Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

OUT OF TIME



OUT OF TIME

History and Evolution in Anthropological

Discourse, Second Edition

Includes New Afterword

NICHOLAS THOMAS

Ann Arbor

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright © Nicholas Thomas 1989

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 1996

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

SPrinted on acid-free paper

1999 1998 1997 1996

4321

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise

without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Thomas, Nicholas, 1928-

Out of time : history and evolution in anthropological discourse /

Nicholas Thomas. - 2nd ed., includes new afterword.

p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-472-08377-5 (pbk.)

Copyright © Nicholas Thomas 1989 Copyright © by the University of Michigan 1996 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @) Printed on acid-free paper

1. Ethnology-Philosophy. 2. History. 3. Social evolution.

4. Ethnology-Polynesia. 5. Polynesia-History. I. Title.

1999 1998 1997 1996

GN345.2.T48 1996

306'.01-dc20

4 3 2 1

96-13807

CIP

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Thomas, Nicholas, 19280ut of time : history and evolution in anthropological discourse I Nicholas Thomas. - 2nd ed., includes new afterword. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-08377-5 (pbk.) I. Ethnology-Philosophy. 2. History. 3. Social evolution. 4. Ethnology-Polynesia. 5. Polynesia-History. I. Title. GN345.2.T48 1996 306'. 0 1--dc20 96-13807 CIP

for Margaret Jolly



I feel the earth move under my feet.

I feel the tumbling down tumbling down

Einstein on the beach (1976)



Contents

Acknowledgements

page xi

Introduction

1

1 History and anthropological discourse

9

2 Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and the foundations of modern

anthropology

18

3 The background to Polynesian anthropology

29

4 An evolutionary argument and its sources

35

5 Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

51

6 Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

69

7 Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the

Pacific

86

8 Histories structured and unstructured

102

9 The look of events

117

Afterword to the second edition

123

Notes

129

Bibliography

143

Index

153



Acknowledgements

Although this book was mostly written in Cambridge in the first half of 1987, the

ideas put forward in it developed over a longer period. My debts to colleagues,

students, friends and other writers are as numerous as the conversations and bits

of reading which had even a tangential bearing on the questions discussed here.

For their advice and comments on drafts I am grateful in particular to Pascal

Boyer, John Dunn, Johannes Fabian, Anthony Giddens, Chris Gregory, Caroline

Humphrey, Roger Keesing and Tanya Luhrmann; for teaching me a lot about

Pacific history I thank Niel Gunson; I am grateful also to King's College for pro-

viding an environment which enabled me to write the book. I owe more than I

can say to Margaret Jolly's encouragement and intellectual help. Special thanks

also to Anna Jolly, who helped keep me going.



Introduction

Anthropologists and other social scientists have often attempted to resolve

the split between the historical study of change over time and a sociological

or anthropological analysis of systems at a particular time - which often in

fact takes them out of all time. Although it is widely recognized that there is

something fundamentally wrong with an ahistorical social science - just as

there is with a history which neglects the structural properties of social and

cultural phenomena - these efforts have only recently borne much fruit.

Anthropologists have attempted to include history, or even started to write

history, and historians have drawn on particular sociological or an-

thropological concepts. The broader impact of these tendencies is not yet

apparent: from some perspectives, central concerns have been transformed;

others display what a recent reviewer of Roy Wagner has dubbed 'a

considered disregard for revived anthropological interests in (conventional)

history and practice' (Foster 1987: 155). It might be asserted that much

recent anthropological history has delighted in the unconventional, but the

point is precisely that this is not acknowledged - that a separation might be

maintained between a distinct 'historical' endeavour and whatever anthro-

pology is. There is certainly no unified theory of cultural or social systems in

history. However, because modern life involves both so much change and

such manifestly pervasive systems as, for instance, the world economy,

attempts to integrate these kinds of knowledge might even be taken to be

central to a better knowledge of our contemporary situation.

The surge of interest in the history/anthropology conjuncture has seen

relatively little sustained discussion of precisely why anthropology was, and

to some extent continues to be, ahistorical. This book is about what it means

for anthropological texts and comparative discussions to be 'out of time'.

Failure to address this question can only lead to an implicit perpetuation of

the flaws of earlier work. It is apparent that history is often introduced in

order to deny its significance. History has not been neglected simply through

an oversight, but for complex conceptual and discursive reasons. Only an

analysis of the conditions of anthropological writing which set the discourse

out of time can enable us to transcend these constraints.

Introduction

In attempting to depict, criticize and transcend the conventions and

representations of a discipline 'out of time', I resort in what follows to a

polemical collage - polemical in the sense that it demands reconstruction

rather than mere revision in the social sciences (and anthropology in

particular); and a collage in the sense that its claims are worked out through

several different registers. I have jumbled together epistemological critique,

evolutionary theory, substantive revision of Polynesian anthropology, and

some discussion of the history of anthropological ideas about the Pacific.

With respect to the last, I do not contribute to a history of ideas for itself,

but simply present certain stories which are subordinated to the objectives of

my critique.

In case it is thought that this jumble arises simply from a playful desire to

destabilize reigning categories, I should emphasize that these typically

distinct discourses are brought together precisely because one of the main

lines of my argument is that they are implicitly tangled to a much greater

degree than is normally acknowledged. My demonstration aims not simply

to prove this, but to establish that it matters. I draw upon the cases of

historical and evolutionary ideas; the former the subject of much current

discussion in anthropology, the latter occupying, I argue, a crucial but

undisclosed position in the logic of the discipline. I offer reformulations of

approaches to both evolution and history, and in this context the

epistemological discussion assumes a different significance: it becomes less a

general argument to be exemplified, and more a set of issues internal to the

more specific problem of reshaping certain anthropological constructs -

which, to complete the circle, is another way of asserting the degree of

entanglement mentioned above. The project is neither strictly epistemological

nor purely analytical: the aim is rather to demonstrate, through discussion

of anthropological discourse on Polynesia, that the development of a more

satisfactory perspective cannot take place without a pattern of theoretical

and interpretive shifts in apparently distinct realms. The value of one

apparently specific or purely theoretical critique or revision may thus arise

less from its direct implications than from what it produces in another

context.

An initial distinction between what I have done and much other recent

anthropological writing on epistemology and the general orientation of the

discipline may be helpful. This arises from the emphasis in general on what

amounts to a subjective angle, on the ethnographer's knowing and

knowledge. It is as though all the problems are tied up with experience and

procedures in the field, and with the constructs which the so-called 'writing-

up' of fieldwork generates (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and

Fischer 1986; Borofsky 1987). This dimension is certainly important, and I

too would want to emphasize that 'academic and literary genres in-

terpenetrate' (Clifford 1986: 2), but my concern is mainly with the reading

Introduction

rather than the making of anthropological texts, with the discourses of

anthropological genres and theories, of both ethnography and interpretation,

rather than reflection upon the formation of the units of ethnographic

knowledge. Anthropology is not just ethnography; in fact, the meanings

which can be attached to ethnographic case studies depend on wider

schemes, on classifications of societies, and on polemics which generate

interest in particular projects at particular times. Anthropological works are

moreover constantly drawn into comparative studies, syntheses, and re-

analyses within the discipline, as well as purposes on the margins such as the

contextualization of museum objects, and a variety of more definitely

'popular' uses. At this level the texts must be seen as a set of cultural

products; the individual ethnographer's knowledge ceases to be the

appropriate frame for critical discussion.

Two statements about what this book is not: first, it avoids case studies

which illustrate in any extensive way the proposed approach to evolution and

history. The discussions of Pacific material are merely illustrative (although

they draw partly on more extensive treatments published elsewhere). A

reader who feels that nothing short of an extended case study can be

persuasive will, of course, remain unpersuaded, but the extent of my

discussion of Polynesian histories is only proportionate with the need to

work through an example from a number of distinct angles. Secondly, I do

not deal with questions specifically about historical knowledge, or the

constitution of ' ethnohistory' as a subdiscipline, such as the relation between

indigenous views of history and the historical constructions of European

scholars. These are of considerable importance in parts of the Pacific and

Africa, among other places, but would require an extensive discussion of the

politics of knowledge in particular regions, and are only contingently related

to the more general issues I pursue here. I would want, in any case to avoid

the notion that the subject-matter of this work is 'ethnohistory', that is, a

marginal overlap between history and anthropology, which might be

developed in certain ways which have no particular implications for either

core discipline. My aim, and what I take to be the aim of a number of other

writers, is a more consequential conjuncture of history and anthropology,

which transforms, rather than merely links, each of the two practices; as

Cohn has observed, one seeks to create 'not just... another new specialty, not

just... the means by which more hyphenated histories and anthropologies

may be generated, but ... the means by which an epistemology and a subject

matter common to the two disciplines might be reasserted' (1980: 216).

I have refrained from extended definitional discussion of terms such as

'evolution' and 'history ', because I take the view that meanings subsist in the

uses of concepts in texts, rather than in authorial pronouncements which

may bear little relation to the order of a discourse. There is, of course, a

tension between former characterizations - in which history is an empirical

Introduction

succession of events and evolution refers to progressive development - and a

merging of meanings in a more satisfactory analysis of change which is

processual and systemic but neither directed nor abstracted. There are thus

certain shifts in the implicit definitions manipulated here, and presumably

the point of theoretical argument is an alteration of meanings of concepts. I

do not attempt to further complicate this work by engaging in some kind of

auto-analysis of the book's 'writing up'. However, I may forestall some

criticism by pointing out that I use history to mean events and social

processes rather than the knowledge of such events and processes. Cultural

and epistemological issues about traditions, and the representation of events

and actions must be dealt with, but entail problems which are quite distinct

from the substantive and theoretical questions of historical effect, with which

I am more concerned here.1

This distinction may be meaningless to those who take the view that past

events have no bearing on a social situation or cultural order unless they are

perceived and imagined by the actors involved, unless they are part of what

is recognized as a salient 'history'. The theoretical step of equating all history

with history as it is perceived can be seen as a reaction to an intransigent,

positivist account which insists that socially objective history is a process of

real past events which can only be more or less imperfectly mirrored in

historical narrative. The positivist view neglected the fact that histories are

produced, that particular depictions employ cultural codes, carry political

agendas, and impose various kinds of narrative metaphors - they are, in

short, anything but 'faithful' or unproblematic representations. Noticing

that histories are written, and repudiating the positivists' preoccupation with

an exhaustive (and therefore inaccessible) image of the past, should not,

however, lead us to scrutinize nothing other than historical representations,

or insist that there is no reality external to such representations. The

distinctiveness of particular social self-images frequently arises from the

circumstances which they express and mediate, and the origins and

determinants of particular ways of seeing often lie beyond, or are erased by,

those visions themselves. Reference must therefore be made to events which

are not necessarily taken seriously by the people being considered. This is to

expose their world view to question, but if we do not believe that our own

national ideologies and cultures should be uncritically sustained, it seems

peculiar that other people's representations should be privileged.

In focussing on theoretical aspects of the anthropology-history re-

lationship, I am not, of course, dealing with newly exposed ground. The

larger problems of the relation between various kinds of models of social or

cultural systems, and temporal processes, have surfaced often enough in the

history of social theory, and Giddens (1979, 1981), for example, has recently

emphasized the importance of situating practices and social relations in both

existential and longer-term time.

Introduction

Institutions are practices which 'stretch' over long time-space distances in the

reproduction of social systems. The structural practices of social systems 'bind' the

temporality of the durie of the day-to-day life-world to the longue durde of

institutions, interpolated in the finite span of existence of the individual human being.

(1981: 28)

A parallel, though more specific, theoretical emphasis might be seen in the

opening sections of Bourdieu's influential tract on theorizing practice, which

exposed the atemporal character of structuralist perspectives on gift exchange

(1977: 3-7). The point that temporality should be seen to be constitutive of,

rather than marginal to, social and cultural systems is thus well established

at a general level, but there has been surprisingly little discussion of what

kind of time should become important in social analysis, and surprisingly

little consideration of what distinct kinds of intellectual practice a more

integrated endeavour would depend upon (but cf. B. Cohn 1980: 220-1).

Giddens was concerned primarily with transformations at a general level in

the temporal (and spatial) constitution of particular social forms; he

emphasized, for instance, that capitalism was predicated on the separation of

time as a commoditized, abstract dimension from time as the substance of

lived experience (1981: 130-1). This underlines the cultural specificity of the

opposition between existence as a condition and an external flow of events,

but analysis at the level of social theory does not enable one to reveal the

historical constitution of particular social forms or statements. This is, of

course, hardly the purpose of social theory, but the consequence is that one

must explore analytic procedures at a different level, if one is to effectively

incorporate in case studies the implications of theoretical propositions such

as Giddens'. Much of the critique of functionalism, structuralism and certain

other paradigms has been concerned with the atemporal aspect of those

approaches, and the ambiguous or marginal status of time is alluded to at

various points in the critiques I develop. My main concern, though, is more

specific: it is with the absence of historical time, and with the explicit or

implicit negation of the notion that history has any constitutive effect in the

social situation under consideration. It is possible for marginal reference to

be made to history or the 'historical context' (as in Wagner's [1986] study of

the Barok of New Ireland), or for analysis to deal partly with temporal

processes (e.g. Munn 1986), without there being any interest in the

significance of historical processes in the system being examined.

Various schools of historians, perhaps most notably the Annales group,

have been oriented towards 'sociological' history of one sort or another, and

historians such as Keith Thomas (1971) and Norman Cohn (1970) have

frequently made reference to anthropological insights into such phenomena

as witchcraft and millennial movements. It must, however, be recognized

that such borrowings, like those which characterized debates about

rationality in philosophy and anthropology, did not represent any serious

Introduction

integration of methods or theories. Particular historical problems might have

been illuminated, and ethnographies of past societies might have been

valuable in their own terms, but an essential separation persisted between

analytic narratives of change and development, and systemic expositions to

which change was peripheral.

Well-known essays which dwelt upon the negative aspects of the exclusion

of history from anthropology were published by such influential anthro-

pologists as Evans-Pritchard (1962)2 and L6vi-Strauss (1968) many years

ago, and these led to some debate, mainly within British social anthropology

(e.g. Lewis (ed.) 1968) (since 'history' of a diffusionist sort had never been

excluded in American anthropology with quite the same vigour). But what is

notable about the discipline is that these critiques had very little effect upon

the core of anthropological discussion - which has continued to be occupied

by the analysis of ethnography, that is, by the systematic but non-historical

exploration of problems of ritual, economics, kinship, politics and so on

(which is not to say that certain valuable historical anthropological studies

have not been produced, but rather that they would not have been identified

as canonical anthropological works). In the case of Levi-Strauss's essay, it is

arguable that the admirable views put forward found no expression even in

his own major works. This itself suggests that there are more fundamental

problems which these authors neglected.

The discipline is permeable, and overlaps with such diverse subjects as

geography, aesthetics, archaeology, philosophy and history, and there has

thus been a spectrum of 'ethnohistories', works of historical anthropology,

and historical studies influenced by anthropological theory. There is a great

deal of work which seems to be animated by the conjunction of history and

anthropology, but much of this does not transcend the limitations of earlier,

ahistorical paradigms. Some studies simply draw evidence from a historical

period into a synchronic analysis of a cultural or social system. What is

abstracted from time is thus a set of archival sources, rather than a set of

fieldwork observations (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1949; Valeri 1985; cf. Bloch

1987; Geertz 1980). Some other works add much to our knowledge of

indigenous perceptions of history or tradition, but do not historicize the

indigenous perceptions themselves: the overarching context, and reference

point for interpretation, remains an intransigently atemporal culture, rather

than a historical process (e.g. Borofsky 1987; Parmentier 1987). The

historical context is often mentioned in an introductory or marginal way, but

has no genuine analytic role or discursive place (cf. Thomas n.d.2). There

have been studies, however, which offer more profound reconstructions of

culture in history, and which actually situate their objects of discussion as

outcomes of historical processes. Gewertz's study of gender, trading

relationships, and the development of hierarchy in a Sepik regional system

(1983) provides a good example, as does Moore's analysis of the evolution

Introduction

of Chagga 'customary' law (1986). Comaroff's study, Body of power, spirit

of resistance (1985), which deals with the development of Barolong (South

African) cosmology and ritual in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

overcomes the anthropological tendency to lapse into talk either of power

and inequality or of meaning and symbolism in its depiction of resistant

symbolic practice and anti-colonial culture. Since my concerns are with the

incorporation of colonial history in particular, as well as temporal processes

in general, in anthropological thought, Comaroff's approach is close to that

enunciated here (see also Bloch 1986; Bare 1987; Fabian 1986; Fox 1977;

Frankel 1986; Humphrey 1982; Rosaldo 1980; Wood 1982). Other works

might be cited, but my point is simply that the exercise undertaken here does

not derive from a vacuum, but from a wave of interest in the disciplines of

anthropology and history - which in some cases has deeper roots in our

desire to connect the sophistication of analysis with the actualities of political

and economic crises, and in the mutual entanglement of 'observers' and

'observed' in colonial (or ostensibly 'post-colonial') inequalities.

I am not, however, concerned simply to articulate the premises of recent

works in historical anthropology. Many of these are, in any case, concerned

much more with local substantive issues than with the question of the

compatability or otherwise of particular forms of knowledge. I aim rather to

establish what deeper features of anthropological practice and style have

made such a conjunction so elusive. As was stated above, this point turns

upon a reconsideration of ideas about 'theory' and general epistemological

models, and some more specific issues, such as the status of archival sources

in anthropology. Since an evolutionary model of some explicit or covert

variety has generally taken the place of 'history' as anthropology's

chronological frame, a reinstallation of history depends more directly upon

a reconstruction of evolutionary notions than most current writing can

acknowledge.

Anthropology is a diverse and uneven subject. Arguments which are

heretical or contentious for some schools or perspectives are almost

axiomatic for others; further elaboration of some points in this work might

thus have been desirable for some readers, but tedious for others. It is clear,

however, that there is by no means a consensus that anthropological studies

of non-western societies should focus upon the colonial entanglement, and

the way that this has constituted symbolic orders as well as social and

economic relations. Such a view may not be frequently criticized by

proponents of other sets of concerns, but the fact that numerous symbolic

anthropologists persist in analysing domains of meaning and metaphor

without reference to historic context reveals that a theoretical and ideological

struggle is taking place - perhaps at the level of personal debate and seminar

argument more often than in print. This book aims to synthesize one side of

such a debate, though without suggesting that symbolic anthropology is an

7

Introduction

unprofitable endeavour. Indeed, another angle of my argument, as I have

stated, is that some of the theoretical complexities are confounded by

anthropological metaphors, which is a way of saying that the discipline and

discourse of anthropology itself needs to be analysed symbolically. My claim

is not to present an original approach; the argument is rather that if several

emerging positions - a kind of cultural critique, a kind of socio-historical

analysis, a consciousness of the history (and prehistory) of anthropological

writing - are brought together, then another way of seeing the subject can

be consolidated. This way is not simply more consistent and inclusive

intellectually, but also brings our conceptual efforts into a closer relation

with the social experiences and struggles which surround us.

History and anthropological discourse

Varieties of anthropology suppose distinct objects of knowledge. The

'customs', savage throught-processes and ideas about magic which pre-

occupied early ethnologists occupied a different space to social organization

and the quasi-organic cultural system of functionalism. There is no less a gap

between the ecological processes of cultural materialism and the metaphors

and elisions of symbolic analysis. It cannot be suggested that there is some

definite thing like 'human culture' containing puzzles which have simply

been tackled in different ways by diverse anthropological schools. The thing

talked about and the kinds of puzzle that matter are and have been generated

by intellectual and political concerns. An emergent set of interests will

redefine the object and dismiss some old puzzles. Debates are abandoned

more often than resolved. Those who initiate revisions or more radical

conceptual departures presumably believe that these will lead to fuller or

more relevant explanations and interpretations, depending upon their

concerns; toward science or a better understanding, if their bias is positivist

or relativist.

The marginalization of history

What follows is in part an argument for such a reorientation. There are great

divergences between perspectives in social theory of the kind noted above,

but almost all have made objects for attention which are detached from time,

and particularly so from the grimy historical time of events and intrusions.

In a great many cases temporal and historical processes were simply

undiscussed or excluded; where they were not, time and change were

understood to be secondary to some field of relationships or entity which was

best understood in non-temporal, systemic terms. The view developed here

is that historical processes and their effects are internal to social systems and

that attempts to analyse societies without reference to history are likely to

embody both theoretical errors and substantive misinterpretations. The

misrecognition of consequences of colonial penetration as elements of a

timeless 'culture' exemplifies most directly the link between specific empirical

9

History and anthropological discourse

questions and the deeper blindness of anthropological reasoning, but

represents only one sort of effect that the combination of ahistorical theory

and good or bad evidence may have in anthropological writing.

The critique cannot be reduced to a 'correction' of misrecognition, of the

failure to distinguish recent effects or disentangle invented tradition: 'we

simply regarded gender relations and residence patterns among the X as

elements of their culture, but now we know that these reflected adaptations

to the colonial situation'. Historical appreciations do demand revised

understandings but also raise fundamental issues about the nature of the

standard objects for anthropological discussion, as well as the research and

writing practice which keeps these studied things in intellectual circulation.

So long as ethnographic fieldwork is mandatory and historical work

marginal in an anthropological career, attempts to alter understanding are

doomed to the extent that conceptions of objects arise from the way they are

known. There is clearly no absolute determinism in this relationship, but if

the discipline continues to give intricate and intimate knowledge of localities

a privileged status, one could no more expect anthropologists to appreciate

history, than one could expect those who study ancient inscriptions to focus

on sentiments in personal interaction. This is partly because ethnography is

likely to have a limited bearing on certain issues (such as longer-term

change), but also because the elevation of personal ethnographic under-

standing as the basis for satisfactory description and some mysterious

intuitive understanding disables other forms of evidence.1

It may be inferred from this that I am not merely concerned to assert that

time, and specifically history, is 'more important' than has generally been

acknowledged. This has been said often enough, although the core of

anthropological practice has not changed as a result.2 The problem is that 'a

historical perspective' cannot simply be added to anthropology as it is. I

argue that this would reproduce the fundamental opposition between the

'society' (or 'culture') as the primary thing known, and some subsequent

sequence of events, which somehow is not directly linked with the inner

properties of the system considered. The discipline's object is a system or

structure which has an ordered character precisely because contingency and

temporality are excluded. The opposition was developed in the strongest and

most self-conscious way by Levi-Strauss (1966: 233f.) but has a much deeper

basis in the history of the human sciences, and could be seen as one of the

elementary features of anthropological discourse. The separation is mani-

fested at the larger level in the gap between a kind of narrative history which

is now rather old-fashioned, and subjects such as anthropology and

sociology, and also in the foundation of modern anthropology at the

moment of the exclusion of diachronic diffusionism (or evolutionism) in

favour of synchronic sociology. I argue in the next chapter that in Radcliffe-

Brown's work it is especially clear that questions arising from the former

10

History and anthropological discourse

perspective had to be ruled out or set aside if fruitful work along roughly

Durkheimian lines was to proceed. Anthropology has come a long way since

Radcliffe-Brown, but continues (in both Britain and the United States) to be

constituted by the same kinds of exclusions. The dichotomy also emerged

and persisted in the divergence of studies of 'acculturation' or 'social

change' from functional or structural analyses of systems. The inability of a

variety of traditional paradigms to integrate history with anthropology's

central concerns is reflected in the fact that studies of the 'social change'

genre always associate change with European contacts or some colonial

presence: a definite opposition is sustained between an authentic and more

or less unitary traditional entity, of great richness and cultural complexity,

and on the other hand a heterogenous, relatively uninteresting and

unproblematic intrusion of persons such as missionaries and settlers, and

innovations such as cash crops and items of European technology. This

penetration has consequences which can be examined, but these are

subsequent to the culture as a primary thing which can be understood,

initially, without reference to intrusions. This is what Cohn has aptly dubbed

'the missionary in the row boat' theory of change (1980: 199).

The logic of small-scale, 'tribal' or peripheral societies might alternatively

be seen to be interpenetrated with this sort of colonial history in two ways:

first, assuming that the ethnographer is not the first European on the scene,

there are prior ways in which external change has had internal ramifications.

Secondly, the structural properties of a local indigenous system can be seen

to emerge in the nature of interaction with colonial forces and in particular

developments. Different case histories in different areas are not just variations

upon the extension of colonial influence, but are also outcomes of the

differences between the social systems which are colonized.

But in most accounts there can be no continuity between the apparently

messy and haphazard events of colonial history and earlier processes of

'endogenous' change, which tend not to be recognized. Although no

anthropologist would now claim that a traditional society was formerly

static, such a view in fact remains a premise in much anthropological writing,

and particularly that concerned with hunter-gatherer societies which are

frequently thought in some sense to reflect continuities from palaeolithic and

neolithic epochs.3

The persistence of discredited ideas

These general arguments are developed in more detail in relation to

particular studies. It may be thought that much of what has been said applies

largely to 'out of date' perspectives in social anthropology such as

functionalism, which is now notorious for its exclusion of history. We all

already know that this was a flaw, so why bother discussing the problem at

11

History and anthropological discourse

length? I even discuss and criticize extensively an earlier, pre-functional form

of anthropology, a discourse of culture-traits or 'shreds and patches', which

emerged from museums early this century - and this must seem even more

distant from contemporary anthropological orientations. But in these dated

visions curious ways of seeing can be detected; just as the formal element

of representation is more striking in foxed nineteenth-century photographs

than in yesterday's glossy snapshots. We can recognize, moreover, the

continuities which our modernity seeks to write off. Part of my argument in

later sections of this book is thus that recent apparently sophisticated

theories - even including those attempting to capture history - have failed to

shrug off in practice ideas which are discredited in so far as they are

expressed. We may mention a historical context, but does that necessarily

mean that it in any way animates the analysis? The argument for the

exclusion of an eventful process, which was established by Radcliffe-Brown

(among other functionalist writers) is no longer stated explicitly or

vehemently, but since the concept of an unhistorical analysis has been

developed in the practice of the discipline, perhaps such restatement has

simply been unnecessary. Intellectual critique must, of course, attend to the

unsaid as well as the said.

My point about anthropological discouse is thus partly that stated

premises or explicit theory do not have the status which texts or scientific

procedures might wish to ascribe to them; writing is like politics in the sense

that unstated rationales, hidden agendas, covert classifications, and simple

muddles are more important than what either the prime minister or an

anthropological writer claim to be doing. Arguments come to their

conclusions in disguise as often as books fail to correspond to what their

authors say they are. Thus metaphors derived from contemporary political

scandals are thus more useful in this epistemology than what, for example,

Karl Popper has written. In particular, I stress that the absence of 'evolution'

as an explicit organizing conceptual principle in much anthropology is quite

misleading. The fact that most modern approaches have either actively

repudiated or passively ignored or marginalized history and longer-term

frameworks (of an evolutionary or diffusionist kind) strongly suggests that

some sort of evolutionary scheme persists in a covert way: there are, after all,

strong pressures to link particular events and cases into an overarching

chronology. The problem of history is thus linked to that of evolution, and

to the more general features of anthropological discourse.

The continuities between such modern perspectives as neo-Marxist

regional systems theory and ways of seeing which have been long left behind,

such as the dry and stilted recitation of ethnographic attributes in museum

anthropology, may be unexpected and demand explanation. Here, questions

of the nature of anthropological evidence are crucial. The commonsense

empiricist notion is that facts have nothing to do with theory and certainly

12

History and anthropological discourse

do not depend on it. This view persists in ordinary understanding and is of

great consequence in some contexts such as journalism, where the motivated

character of various descriptive forms is unacknowledged. However, even

within the orthodox philosophy of science, this view has been extensively

modified (e.g. Lakatos and Musgrave 1970). My interest is less in general

propositions about such issues as the extent to which scientific observation

may depend on theory, but relates rather to the particular forms which

evidence may take in anthropology, and the implications of the fact that a

certain sort of thing counts as 'data' to the exclusion of other things. I

emphasize a much greater presence of implicit 'theory' in evidence than

commonsense notions of data allow for. This point can be illustrated briefly

through reference to John Beattie's work on the African kingdom of

Bunyoro. One of Beattie's field methods involved organizing essay

competitions for literate Nyoro on ethnographic topics such as the following:

4. 'In-law-ship' (obuko) and the mother's brother-sister's son relationship (obwihwa).

Explain the meanings of theses terms. Particularly, does a father-in-law respect his

son-in-law ... explain how a person's mother's brothers regard and treat him. Are they

allowed to be angry with him?

7. Sorcery. Say all you know about sorcery ... Discuss... a particular case ... were the

sorcerer and his victim kin, and if so what was their relationship?... (1965: 33)

The resulting material is not merely biased because the population must have

been unevenly represented among the competitors, but, much more

significantly, is moulded by the specific concerns of one phase of African

structural-functionalist anthropology, and to some extent takes on the

inductive, generalized form of the paradigm's anthropological description.

Yet Beattie seems to have regarded these essays as a sort of raw data, and

even makes the astonishing claim that such texts allowed 'the culture ... to

speak for itself' (1965: 30). This is an extreme case, but comparable

connections almost always exist in a more subtle form. Many recent and

sophisticated ethnographies continue to privilege the words or texts of a

privileged few, or even of an individual master who is charged with the

enunciation of his culture (e.g. Parmentier 1987). Such expositions do not

necessarily play only upon elite meanings, but the continuities between the

experienced meanings of everybody's culture and the nuances of intellectual

elaboration all too frequently remain hypothetical (cf. Keesing 1987).

Statements of a very singular kind are thus still taken to express the

properties of much more general entities. The methods of cultural

anthropology therefore appear, at a general level, to be problematic; the

basis for belief in particular descriptions is evidently a sort of generalized

faith in the procedure of deriving insight from fieldwork, rather than any

assessment of the development of particular interpretations.

Social scientists may now recognize in the context of epistemological

13

History and anthropological discourse

discussion that the commonsense models of data and scientific procedures

are inadequate, but examination of their practice generally reveals that facts

and hypotheses are developed in a way which fails to reflect an epistemology

distinguishable from scientistic common nonsense. Specific 'biases', which

are taken to distort the ethnography, are frequently a focal point for criticism

and reinterpretation, but the overall separation between the larger corpus of

evidence, and various arrays of methods and research practices, is sustained.

The significance of this for shifts and continuities in anthropological

thought is that the interpretative content of past bodies of evidence is ignored

or appreciated to a very limited extent. Because facts in particular genres

such as museum-generated ethnography were animated by a distinct

intellectual practice, the use of evidence derived from such studies in recent

anthropological accounts is likely to unwittingly incorporate certain notions

associated with the world view of museum anthropology. Something like this

idea was, however, behind anthropologists' refusals to draw on missionary

sources, which have provided the paradigm of 'biased' unprofessional

description. In some diffuse and unspecified way, imputed ideas are supposed

to have contaminated observation.

Writing off such sources is equivalent to refusing to read newspapers

because one knows that their corporate owners have a particular view of the

world which is manifest in reportage and misreportage. Of course newspapers

are read by many people who at least think that they bear publishers' world

views in mind, and who therefore assess the way things are put and perhaps

rework them. Neither museum literature nor missionary ethnography can be

dismissed en bloc - the genres, like journalism, may provide the only

accounts available, and presumably flawed information is better than no

information. Rather, 'professional' ethnographic accounts should be

understood to be problematic, and something other than straightforward

descriptions, to be questioned just like non-anthropological ethnography,

such as is found in diverse letters home, explorers' and missionaries'

narratives, and even in the motivated reports emerging from colonial

administrations. In the past, the former category has enjoyed an undiscussed

status, while the latter has been derided and rejected. Both need to be

subjected to scrutiny and used, not simply as sources for 'ethnographic'

information in the stricter sense of descriptions of customs and behaviour,

but also as means to understanding the metropolitan intrusions which make

observation and description possible.

The absurdity of suppressing the continuity between anthropological

description and the works of such as missionaries becomes transparent if it

is recalled that the transition was reflected in individual lives as much as in

larger associations between discourses. Missionaries such as Maurice

Leenhardt and Carl Strehlow produced celebrated examples of cultural

ethnography, which have never had a secondary or merely semi-professional

14

History and anthropological discourse

status. Yet precisely the persistence of such an implausible boundary testifies

to its significance in the scheme of anthropological meaning.

I do not develop criticisms of museum anthropology and functionalism

simply because their writings reveal the mystifications and the burden of the

past in contemporary anthropology. It is also important to think over and

judge those earlier genres because they will continue to be deployed, not only

as cases and sources within the academic discipline, but also in various ways

without. Early museum ethnographies, as well as such works as Leenhardt's

books on Melanesian culture in New Caledonia, are drawn into the self-

representations of people with political claims and objectives.4 If at one stage

the knowledge of native cultures consciously or unconsciously served the

effort toward colonial control, we now see something like the same

knowledge turned toward anti-colonial or autonomist struggle. It is not the

business of anthropologists to instruct the leaders of such movements, but it

may be that revelations about the writing of early descriptions, and new

judgements about the relationships of context and text, reflect on present

political meanings. In very different circumstances, Margaret Mead's

Samoan studies had implications for sex education and child-rearing in the

United States; the potential ramifications in those areas of Derek Freeman's

so-called refutation of her work (Freeman 1982) have not been overlooked

by such bodies as the Moral Majority.

Organization of this book

In the next chapter I discuss some of the work of two major, but very

different, anthropological figures in order to establish that, despite

anthropology's diversity, the subject as a totality can be seen to rest upon two

crucial exclusions: of history, and of the work of those lacking professional

ethnographic credentials. Clearly, a discussion of two writers cannot prove

this point in any technical sense, but the theorists I have chosen are

representative of much wider bodies of work.

The point would be of little interest unless it could be demonstrated that

the consequences of these exclusions have been detrimental. I therefore move

into a more extended analysis of work on Polynesian societies, and

specifically into a critique of an influential synthesis, Irving Goldman's

Ancient Polynesian society (1970). In order to establish that an ahistorical use

of ahistorical sources produces specific misinterpretations, I must go into the

evidence, and sketch out reinterpretations. What I elaborate here aims only

to be illustrative, as is appropriate in a work directed at anthropologists in

general rather than regional specialists, but a different perspective would not

be valuable unless it could deliver something different and better in the form

of specific understandings.

Both my critique and reinterpretation depend largely on sources which do

15

History and anthropological discourse

not belong to modern anthropology, but stem rather from the ventures and

incursions of missionaries, explorers and others. The status of such accounts

is of fundamental importance to historical anthropology: the orientation of

the whole exercise depends on judgements about their value, about the issues

that they bear upon. I therefore review some of the writings: the point is not

so much that anthropology has generally failed to acknowledge that these

early accounts sometimes contain reasonable synchronic ethnographic

descriptions, but rather that they refer to events which have often had a

crucial impact on culture. It is segregation of a systemic entity, 'culture' or

'society', from the sorts of events studied by historians, which I argue cannot

be sustained.

This evaluation leads into discussion of another kind of evolutionary

theory, to an approach which refuses to acknowledge the initial opposition

of structure and time. This is the form of neo-Marxist regional systems

theory developed in the work of Ekholm and Friedman. The theory is found

to be more satisfactory in its premises than its application to the Pacific, but

suggestions about the links between longer-term processes in local social

evolution and changes consequent upon European contact point to a crucial

shift towards the integration of the central systemic concerns of anthropology

and apparently contingent histories - the sort of integration which the

fundamental society-event opposition has generally precluded. But these

attempts are by no means unproblematic, as discussion of their implications

for Polynesia reveals. It may surprise some readers that I pay so much

attention to what perhaps seems merely one of a number of attempts to refine

or expand the disintegrated paradigm of neo-Marxist anthropology. But

although Ekholm's work has not been widely appraised, I argue that it has

substantial implications for the wider anthropological endeavour because it

actively displaces classical evolution with another longer time-frame - a

systemic history which can integrate structural transformations and events.

The importance of this step derives from the fact that evolutionary types and

conceptions often persist under the surface in anthropological theories which

do not appear to be evolutionary in orientation. In order to definitively and

effectively break from what (almost) everybody regards as discredited, we

must make this kind of explicit theoretical shift.

In producing more historical analyses, we do not want, however, to

abandon the insights generated by former anthropological paradigms, and

particularly those produced by symbolic analyses. Is it possible to reconstruct

such perspectives in a more historical mode? In a reading of some recent

studies by Marshall Sahlins, I discuss another attempt to integrate structure

and history - parallel to that of Ekholm, except that in these cases the

structures are of a structuralist kind, and history turns out to retain a more

contingent character. I attempt to demonstrate the proposition stated above,

that these sophisticated and novel theories carry a burden of undisclosed

16

History and anthropological discourse

theory which is neither sophisticated nor novel; particularly, they embody

various notions of an evolutionary kind which no-one would want to sustain.

The dependence on ideas of evolutionary change which are not merely

unspecified but are actually analytically submerged suggests that it is in fact

necessary to rework an explicit theory of history or evolution; however, the

models of change offered by Sahlins do not make longer-term structural

transformation possible. Together with the fact that his arguments are far

more applicable to early contact history than to later stages of colonial

confrontation, this indicates the need for different models for different

historical time-scales. Sahlins does make some crucial gains, especially in the

structural analysis of temporal processes, but does leave the interconnections

of meaningful orders and colonial histories unexplored. A perspective

integrating these different historic time-scales - which perhaps would also

speak more directly to contemporary problems in colonial and post-colonial

societies - cannot be arrived at without revision of anthropological method,

both at the levels of analytic procedure through contextualization, and in the

practices of gathering evidence. One of the crucial steps would be the

decentring of ethnographic fieldwork as the source of anthropological

knowledge.

I thus begin by working out some 'epistemological' points in the context of

evolutionary argument, and proceed to developments of evolutionary and

historical analysis which demand reconstruction at an epistemological level.

Half the point of this tangle is an insistence on the indissociable relation of

these different aspects of knowledge - which are certainly not connected in

the neat hierarchy envisaged in empiricist commonsense.

17

2

Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and the

foundations of modern anthropology

... he eschewed guesswork history (one must add, all history).

Evans-Pritchard (1981)

The question must arise of how writing about others, about society and

culture, became ahistorical in the first place. The histories of British and

American anthropology - to which I have felt obliged to confine myself - are

separate, and a full exploration of the issue would require a much longer

work. In the United States, the Boasian school insisted, in opposition to

evolutionism, upon the plurality of cultures and the complexity of specific

historical and geographic influences upon their development. 'History' was

thus not excluded, but was definitely understood in diffusionist terms: the

suggestion that an institution, or some feature of social organization, had

come from elsewhere was a form of explanation. However, the trend in the

work of Lowie, Mead, Radin and Benedict, as well as in others who were not

students of Boas, such as Murdock, was for analysis to revolve around a

mixture of comparative, psychological and functional concerns. 'History', in

diffusionist terms, played a part, but gradually became less and less

significant, so that although recent American anthropology is inflected - in

the context of many other influences - by a Boasian background, general

features, such as the overall orientation toward relativism, are far more

significant than any residual interest in diffusionism (for much more

extensive discussion, see e.g. Stocking 1968).

I argue later, in relation to the Bishop Museum's variant of American

anthropology, that this Boasian approach in fact tended to actively obscure

history, but here I simply point out that the insistence upon the 'historical'

singularity of each group did not necessarily entail any interest in recent

history, or in the current circumstances of the people who were the subject

of ethnological investigation. But since even this unhistorical 'history'

tended to go out of fashion, in its later development American cultural

anthropology did not differ substantially in this respect from its transatlantic

counterpart. So, in the second part of this chapter, I argue that what one of

the founders of the British school was so assertive about, is implicit in the

analysis of a very different writer. The point here is not to argue that Geertz

and Radcliffe-Brown are more similar in their theoretical views than has been

previously recognized, but that some features of anthropological discourse

18

Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and modern anthropology

are so fundamental that they are manifested in writings which are otherwise

utterly different. Particularly, elements of early work, which are heavily

criticized and widely rejected, persist in contemporary writing which

continues to be highly influential. It would not be worth discussing Radcliffe-

Brown at length, if he had not expressed overtly what continues to be

sustained between the lines.

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown was the dominant theorist of the British structural-

functional school and, as such, was one of the most influential anthro-

pologists of this century.' Unlike the other founder figure, Malinowski, his

ethnographic contributions were far less significant than a series of pithy

essays which expounded a positivistic sociology of functional regularities,

especially in the domain of 'social organization' or kinship structure. The

breaking up of the structural-functional perspective in the 1960s naturally

saw his stature diminish, and some more recent judgements of his

contribution have been harsh.2

His work was nevertheless crucial because, along with Malinowski's, it

stands as one of the foundations of what is understood as modern

anthropology. While histories of the subject discuss many earlier writers,

such as Lafitau, Montesquieu, Morgan, Tylor, Frazer and others, these men

are usually regarded by contemporary anthropologists (when they are

regarded at all) as precursors. Although some developed ideas which may

still be interesting, the essential feature of the modern profession has always

been seen as the elaboration of theory or interpretation on the basis of

extended empirical research. This conjunction was not found in writers

before Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown.3 The shift in method towards

fieldwork paralleled a break from evolutionary and diffusionist speculation

in favour of a scientific, law-seeking functionalism - or such was the received

picture.

It has been argued that Radcliffe-Brown was the first 'real professional' in

British social anthropology, because he was professionally trained, paid to be

an anthropologist, taught and trained others, conducted his activities within

institutional frameworks, and wrote for an audience of professional

colleagues rather than the lay public.4 Different criteria could, of course, be

used to identify earlier professional ethnologists, and the definitional issue is

not really important in itself. What is significant, however, is that Radcliffe-

Brown's effort to establish a 'natural science of society' was effected through

a series of exclusions which have had far-reaching consequences in the

discipline. These were, essentially, the rejection of any kind of historical

causality, and the rejection of pre-professional ethnographic research.

A science must have a tightly defined object of study. If it is to appear

rigorous and effective, it must also be able to generate explanations within its

domain. From a positivistic perspective which seeks to generalize about

19

Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and modern anthropology

primitive societies or society as such, a loose view of causality which

acknowledges the importance of particular circumstances and myriad

anterior causes is anathema: such a lack of boundedness and fixity must

completely undermine the effort to specify tight relationships and laws.

Radcliffe-Brown's mature approach was accurately summarised by Eggan:

'a limited number of structural principles [are] isolated by comparative study

of diverse systems and shown to underly a variety of social and cultural

phenomena' (1949: 121). At least in theory, the method thus has no need to

appeal to phenomena or causes beyond the clear boundaries of its own field

of vision: society. There is no dependence on any other science such as

biology or geography for essential elements of an understanding, and the

discourse appears to be autonomous and rigorous. The ramifications of these

issues are, of course, not simply intellectual, as research funding and

institutional status have always been affected by the self-presentations of

various competing subjects, the bias usually being towards those which

appear 'harder' and more like the natural sciences.

Professional foundations: the exclusion of happenings

The first work of Radcliffe-Brown's in which his perspective was presented

was The Andaman Islanders, written before the first world war but not

published until 1922. In some ways it was a transitional work, since the

apprentice research upon which it was based was directed as much at an old-

fashioned description of culture traits, technology and physical anthropology

as the study of social organization. The state of ideas at the time of the

fieldwork (1905-6) was reflected in a appendix on 'The technical culture of

the Andaman Islanders' (1922: 407+94), but two substantial chapters were

dedicated to the elaboration of what he author saw as 'a new method in the

interpretation of the institutions of a primitive people' (1922: ix). These

begin with a dismissal of the diffusiorists who saw themselves as explaining

institutions in one place on the basis of links with other populations or

migrations; this kind of 'hypothetical reconstruction of the past [was] of very

doubtful utility' (1922: 229). Moreover, events in the past which could not

be known with certainty did not 'provide suitable material from which to

draw generalizations' (1922: 229 nl). The appropriate problems were thus

'not historical but psychological or sociological'; the project was not

conjectural history but the 'social physiology' of a 'general system of ideas

and sentiments' or 'customs' (1922: 230).

The sort of 'historical' writing which Radcliffe-Brown had in mind was

often interested in establishing entirely contrived connections between one

group and some civilized centre such as Egypt or India on the basis of

similarities which were both arbitrarily selected and often only superficial.

The attack upon these implausible and peculiarly motivated efforts still

20

Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and modern anthropology

seems justified, but it must be noted that their inadequacy does not in itself

establish the irrelevance of past events to the functioning of a social system

- no more than the fact that some evidence bearing upon a crime has been

misrepresented or irretrievably lost somehow makes that category of

evidence subsequently worthless.5

As Evans-Pritchard succinctly noted, Radcliffe-Brown effectively assimil-

ated all history to that which could only be imperfectly known and excluded

it from the field of analysis. This was a critical step for social anthropology,

because it sealed off the domain of social organization or culture from that

of recent historical change, which permitted the development of apparently

coherent explanation within the former domain. The persisting salience of

this move is evident from the fact that more recent writers continue to

contrapose modern, soundly-based studies to evolutionist or diffusionist

speculation (e.g. La Fontaine 1985: 20-2). However, the analyses which

stemmed from this departure were arguably flawed precisely because history

was ignored.

Radcliffe-Brown did not pretend that European contact had had no

influence on the Andamanese: in the introduction he described the impact of

a penal settlement at Port Blair upon the indigenous population, noting

changes in residence patterns, mobility and depopulation (1922: 10-18).

However, in the subsequent chapter he proceeded to stress that 'what is

really of interest to the ethnologist is the social organisation of these tribes

as it existed before the European occupation of the islands'. Despite

'extensive' changes, it was 'fairly easy...to discover from the natives

themselves what was the constitution of their society in former times' (1922:

22). This claim may be questioned. The penal settlement was established in

1858; from the indigenous point of view this seems to have been a critical if

not catastrophic moment qualitatively different from any earlier foreign

intrusion. There was great hostility at first, and it might therefore be

supposed that Radcliffe-Brown's informants would have had a clear sense of

this dividing line and have understood that he wanted information about

their undisturbed, pre-Port Blair existence. It is difficult to know, however,

the extent to which the informants would have been able to provide accurate

information about the situation fifty years earlier. There was in any case a

distillation of memory and observation, so that it is no longer clear what

information might relate to 1858 and what might be more a part of an

ethnography of a later, colonized society.6 Although Radcliffe-Brown's

Durkheimian analysis depended precisely upon the exclusion of the

contingent happenings of colonial history, a cursory examination tends to

reveal the Andamanese situation partly as a product of forces beyond the

neat domain of 'social organization'. For example, the indigenous ethnic

distinctions are mostly spoken of as though they had deep roots in ancient

linguistic and cultural differentiation, but the separateness of the Jarawa of

21

Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and modern anthropology

south Andaman appears to have been magnified if not created through

contrasting patterns of indigenous resistance. They seem to have been

different principally because they were more hostile, but this state was

represented by several writers as an attribute of their more savage nature,

although one British administrator observed that they 'seem to be very much

what we have made them' (Portman 1899, II: 711). 'Jarawa' in fact appears

not to be a tribal name, but was probably a term meaning enemies or

strangers used by the groups which the British had initial contact with, and

was applied to certain other groups apart from those subsequently

categorized as 'Jarawa' (cf. Portman 1899, I: 76). Radcliffe-Brown in fact

acknowledges this in passing (1922: 10), but proceeds to treat the distinction

as though it had as much historical depth as that between French and

English.

Further issues arise if involvement with foreigners before 1858 is taken into

account. There were many centuries of sporadic contact, which were

probably of limited significance, but ships' visits and shipwrecks became

more frequent in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1771 the

Andamanese were 'aware of the value of iron' and between 1789 and 1796

there was an unsuccessful attempt to establish a colony (ibid: 9- 10).

Portman (1899) mentions other more or less violent incidents of early

contact, too numerous to be reviewed here. The histories of other places

would suggest that such events as these had social and cultural ramifications,

but for Radcliffe-Brown there was no link between the summary history of

his introduction and the real subject-matter of ethnology.

Professional foundations: the monopoly over competence

The second exclusion which was crucial to the establishment of professional

anthropology was that of amateur observers. The need for this was obvious,

since funding for training professional observers could hardly be justified if

one acknowledged that others could do or had done the job of ethnographic

description just as well. There was also a sense that writing about a place was

usually of little value unless it was directly concerned with ethnographic

subjects: the vital data did not emerge in a marginal way from other

descriptive materials.

Because Radcliffe-Brown experienced various difficulties in his fieldwork

in the Andamans (Langham 1981: 247f.), he was obliged to draw on some

articles by the administrator E. H. Man, which had been published in the

Journal of the Anthropological Institute in the 1880s, although at several

points he insinuated that Man's observations or interpretations were less

than convincing (e.g. 1922: 266, 370 nl). Other works, however, are swept

aside: it is noted that M. V. Portman wrote a book called A history of our

relations with the Andamanese; this 'contains a mass of information on the

subject with which it deals, but does not add very much to our knowledge of

22

Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and modern anthropology

the Andamanese themselves' (ibid: 21). Anyone who cares to consult this

book, which Radcliffe-Brown scarcely cites subsequently, will discover that

this statement is a gross misrepresentation. The work in fact contains a great

deal of information on tribal divisions, initiation, marriage, greeting customs,

and many other 'ethnological' matters; some of this information is in a

discursive form, but there is much else scattered through accounts of many

particular events. Another book, F. J. Mouat's Adventures and researches

among the Andaman Islanders (1863), also contains much detail but is only

referred to once (1922: 27).

In these cases earlier writers are mostly denigrated through being ignored,

but in his later work on Australian Aboriginal social organisation, Radcliffe-

Brown felt confident enough to take a more aggressive tone toward those

whom he apparently saw as pre-scientific amateurs. He found most earlier

accounts 'inaccurate', 'misleading' and 'so lacking in precision as to be

almost useless' (1931: 33-4), and proceeded to note that Howitt's and R. H.

Mathews' work, being derived from 'decidedly unreliable' informants, could

not 'be accepted without careful criticism'; Howitt was 'often responsible

for much confusion' (ibid: 33, cf. 52, 55, 56, 66); an account of Spencer and

Gillen's was 'probably inaccurate' (ibid: 49); another passage of their

writing was 'not as precise as might be desired' (ibid: 76, 78); Roth's lists of

kinship terms were 'not very satisfactory' (ibid: 70); his description of

another area 'incomplete and confused' (ibid: 69, cf. 71-2). I am prepared to

believe that many of these texts are in fact more or less seriously flawed, but

what is notable about Radcliffe-Brown's style is the absence of justification

for these aspersions. Despite the fact that The social organization of

Australian tribes is a highly technical monograph which goes into

considerable detail about names and classifications, these condemnations of

other people's evidence are pronounced constantly but not supported in

detail: the suggestion that Howitt's and Mathews' informants were unreliable

is one of the most specific claims, but it is not revealed to the reader why these

informants were less reliable than any others. The charges are quite

unsubstantiated.'7

What the criticisms ignore is the fact that any description prepared with

one set of questions in mind will necessarily be at least slightly inadequate to

the purposes of another set of interests. A highly sophisticated 1980s

ethnography of cultural categories might be based on the most searching

fieldwork, yet be 'so lacking in precision as to be almost useless' in resolving

questions about a distinct topic such as agricultural production. A dedicated

and sympathetic exercise in interpretation, which took the premises of

refractory texts into account, might in fact turn their observations toward

other purposes, but it would be unfair to expect Radcliffe-Brown's scientism

to countenance or even think of such a hermeneutic exercise: description was

simply either good or bad; there was clarity or confusion.

The tone of what may as well be called smears might lead one to make

23

Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and modern anthropology

assumptions about Radcliffe-Brown's personal style or arrogance (e.g.

Langham 1981: 250-3, 290-1), but, apart from leading one into matters of

limited significance for anthropological theory, this would ignore the

systematic, discursive effect of such persistently disparaging comments and

allusions. The repetitive and generalized character of the criticisms suggests

that there was another implicit project beyond the clarification of Aboriginal

social groupings in Radcliffe-Brown's book.8 This sense is reinforced by the

work's final paragraph:

My chief purpose has been to remove certain misconceptions about the Australian

social organization that are current in anthropological literature and thus to clear the

way forward for a sociological study of the Australian culture. As a result of the

researches carried out during the last four years by Lloyd Warner, Elkin, Miss

McConnel, Hart, Thomson and Piddington, researches which it is hoped will be

continued, it is now possible to undertake that study with some hope of reaching valid

and important conclusions.

(1931: 124)

The value of clearing the ground may be self-evident, but it is unfortunate

that this agricultural or colonizing metaphor is reminiscent of the activities

of the white settlers who displaced Aboriginal landowners and created a

vacant space for their own projects and achievements. The cumulative effect

of Radcliffe-Brown's allegations is to discredit a whole generation of writers,

to suggest that disentangling their usage is an unprofitable exercise, that their

works are better set aside, and attention focussed on the proper research

which was only just beginning. A discursive space was indeed being

colonized.

This is not to say that the work of Radcliffe-Brown embodies the origin or

sole origin of the conditions of professional talk, since such moves were made

by many other anthropologists, both minor and influential, whose work

straddled the interface between the supposedly pre-scientific and professional

phases of the discipline. These exclusions, moreover, are not simply steps

which were taken in the formation of structural-functional anthropology,

but persist, mostly implicitly, as premises in both cultural and social

anthropology in general. In Radcliffe-Brown's discourse the exclusions

which create the anthropological space are pronounced loudly. In later

writers, they are usually not, because that space was already securely

constituted.

Cultural anthropology: implicit exclusions

Who could be more distant from Radcliffe-Brown than humanist, culturalist

and relativist Clifford Geertz, who has envisaged and promoted 'not an

experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of

meaning' (1973: 5)? So far as interests and style are concerned, everything

differs, but in certain crucial respects there is a common frame of discourse.

24

Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and modern anthropology

Geertz's anthropology is characterized by a method of elucidation, rather

than theory. The general propositions and terms are thus very vague; culture

is a text (but how is a text conceived?); religion is a system of symbols (but

then, everything is symbolic).9 The strength of the analysis is not, however,

intended to arise from the elaboration of abstractions, but from an

interpretive working-out of the flow of social discourse in particular contexts

- and, of course, it is in such grounded essays as 'Deep play' on Balinese

cockfights that Geertz's talents are expressed.

An important feature of the perspective is a very close identification

between the elaboration of anthropological understanding and the practice

of ethnography. Thick, culturally rich, contextualized description is arrived

at through fieldwork.10 What is crucial is the 'kind of intellectual effort' this

is: 'sorting out the structures of significance ... and determining their social

ground and import' (1973: 9). This process of analysis is directly identified

with the (partial) establishment of social and cultural competence in the

foreign" situation.

Finding our feet, an unnerving business which never more than distantly succeeds, is

what ethnographic research consists of as a personal experience; trying to formulate

the basis on which one imagines, always excessively, one has found them is what

anthropological writing consists of as scientific endeavour. (1973: 13)

The effect of these propositions is a monopolization of the field of thick

description or cultural interpretation - set up as the proper terrain of

anthropology - by professional ethnographers: only they undergo the

appropriate experience, make the distinctive 'intellectual effort', which

provides the basis for this interpretive quest. Apparently those whose feet

have always been on the ground are not equipped to articulate the sentences

of their 'public document' and it seems obvious that historians, geographers

and others concerned in one way or another with social and cultural analysis

have no part either in this grand endeavour toward 'the enlargement of the

universe of human discourse' (1973: 14) - or if they contribute, it is not on

the basis of the ground we anthropologists have marked out. This approach

to the subject thus excludes both those who analyse or theorize without

ethnographic experience and those who experience without ethnographic

credentials. The exclusion is less prominent in Geertz's discourse than the

insults are in Radcliffe-Brown, because Geertz inhabits an anthropological

world which is already professionalized, from which amateurs are already

excluded. The boundary can thus be implicitly reproduced, and does not

need to be actively created by displacing predecessors and denigrating their

work.

Geertz's analysis operates essentially by identifying vital symbols,

important oppositions, themes, or concerns in the culture studied and

relating an array of acts or other features to whatever has been initially

25

Radclife-Brown, Geertz and modern anthropology

singled out. The identification between Balinese men and their cocks is the

basis for an explication of why the literal and figurative stakes in cockfighting

can be high, how personal antagonisms make them higher, why cocks from

allied groups rather than the same group face each other, and so on (1973:

437f.). Similarly, 'certain central ideas' which reduce to contrasts between

inside/outside and refined/vulgar define 'the Javanese sense of what a person

is' (1983: 60). The approach is problematic because the arguments usually

start with a claim that something is a key symbol or 'central idea'. Such

assertions presumably have a basis in what is inferred from speech or about

thought, but this is not explained. However, such issues are of less concern

than the formal sense in which this analysis is virtually the same as Radcliffe-

Brown's: to modify Eggan's characterization a limited number of cultural

principles are isolated somehow and shown to underly a variety of social and

cultural phenomena. The analysis thus operates by selecting certain features

within a social or cultural domain and demonstrating their consistency or

coherence with others. In a sociological functionalism, this entails estab-

lishing that an institution plays a part such as providing an outlet for social

tensions; in 'interpretive anthropology' it involves showing that some

meanings are versions of others, that an act can be understood to express a

meaning, and so on. While concepts of time may interest both perspectives,

historical time has no place in either.

However, Geertz's exclusion of history is somewhat more complicated

than Radcliffe-Brown's, even though its conceptual absence might be

presumed from its absence in his general discussions of the nature of

anthropology. The difference arises partly from the difference between the

Indonesian and north African societies studied by Geertz and the Andaman

Islanders, who in fact correspond to the stereotype of tribal ethnography: the

people were encountered for the first time by Europeans a couple of centuries

or even just a few decades ago; prior to that, everything is obscure; in effect,

there is no history. This is in any case convenient, because anthropologists

want to treat their customs and beliefs as elements of a unitary, timeless

system, and the idea is most convincing if one thinks of the system as having

operated in an autonomous, undisturbed way for a long time. Of course, so

much is known (in general if not specifically) about population movements,

the spread of world religions, the extensive dynamics of ancient trading

systems, and long histories of interaction with European powers, that such

notions could not be entertained with respect to such places as Morocco,

Java and Bali. (And this is true of most of Asia, the Middle East, north

Africa, Mesoamerica, and of course Europe.) However, the dynamics are

acknowledged without being linked to the category of 'culture'. The

multiplicity of influences is seen as a backdrop which injects richness and

complexity into the present situation (e.g. Geertz 1968: 42-8; Tambiah

1970: 25).

26

Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and modern anthropology

In his famous essay on a Javanese ritual and social change, Geertz raised

the question of the difficulties posed for functionalism by social change and

history. He proposed, however, that these problems can be dealt with if

society and culture are clearly distinguished and seen as 'independently

variable yet mutually interdependent' (1973: 144): neither side of experience

should be reduced or subordinated to the other. Briefly, the article describes

how factors such as the differences between a partly secularized political

party and Islam generated a crisis at a boy's funeral. Rites which were

meaningful were spoilt because they had also come to be signifiers in a larger

ideological struggle. The explanation turns on the discrepancy between

cultural and social circumstances: the people were partly integrated into

urban society, with its patterns of work, stratification, and political life, but

culturally they essentially inhabited the world of rural villagers:

The patterns of belief, expression and value to which the kampong man is committed

- his world view, ethos, ethic, or whatever - differ only slightly from those followed

by the villager. Amid a radically more complex social environment, he clings

noticeably to the symbols which guided him or his parents through life in rural

society. And it is this fact which gave rise to the psychological and social tension

surrounding Paidjan's funeral.

(1973: 165)

The analysis in fact says nothing about history or time but rather uses change

as a mechanism to isolate the incompleteness of systems. Clearly, if

functional theory was entirely adequate, social occasions such as the funeral

would never go horribly wrong as this one did. If meanings were all

effectively shared, confusions and mistakes of this kind should not happen.

The problems created for an analysis which sees people acting out culture as

though it were a coherent public document can be constrained if a specific

source of incoherence is situated in the gap between the social and cultural

aspects of life. The coherence of both domains is potentially preserved; both

can be analysed as systems without reference to time. History simply

sometimes provides the source of discrepancy between the two; there is

certainly no interest in historicizing culture itself.

The apparent openness to history of Geertz's anthropology is thus entirely

illusory. Although very different to British structural analysis, and obviously

an advance upon it, so far as matters of culture and meaning are concerned,

certain underlying features of the discourse are the same. The discipline may

thus have put a crude positivism and much else in Radcliffe-Brown behind

it, but it has not effectively shrugged off the crucial exclusions which

interpretive anthropology, and a variety of other recent schools, continue to

presuppose. What is required now is a fuller demonstration of the ways in

which these exclusions are actually damaging.

27

3

The background to Polynesian

anthropology

Criticism of the ahistorical character of anthropological accounts would be

relatively uninteresting if it simply revealed that this blindness gave rise to

sporadic errors. Strictly theoretical criticism would be equally unimportant

if it failed to establish that an approach free of the alleged fault would

generate novel understandings of particular cases. I thus attempt to establish

that various particular mistakes have systematic features which can only be

explained through a more general critique, and moreover that this critique

makes more powerful reinterpretation possible. This - together with my

argument that the distance between theories and evidence is illusory -

requires that the argument moves constantly between apparently theoretical

and apparently substantive issues, between general subterfuges and particular

explanations.

I have chosen one body of anthropological writing for discussion in detail.

This is the literature concerned with Polynesia, and particularly with social

evolution and transformation in that region. This material is especially

relevant to more general issues of the status of history and anthropological

epistemology, because discussion has been dominated by the interpretation

of traditional variation within the 'culture area' in transformational terms of

one kind or another. The debates have demanded or presumed a knowledge

of traditional systems, but in all cases the societies changed dramatically

between the period of early contact with explorers and the time of

professional observation. The question of quite what is being compared is

thus problematic. One sort of historical time tends therefore to be excluded

from (evolutionist) models which are ostensibly about temporal, diachronic

processes. The peculiar formulations of unashamedly evolutionist arguments

- which are somewhat discredited in contemporary anthropological culture

- are found to permeate quite different, non-evolutionist, paradigms. A

cluster of contradictions associated with the preoccupation with the

traditional despite history thus emerges very clearly in the Polynesian case

(but is hardly specific to it). The existence of a substantial corpus of early

twentieth-century ethnography, as well as substantial and diverse bodies of

earlier documentation, permits me to pursue the issue, alluded to above, of

28

The background to Polynesian anthropology

the status of different forms of evidence in shifting theoretical perspectives.

The status of history is, of course, linked in the closest possible way to

notions of the worth of historical sources, and the significance of the

problems such sources tend to speak to.

The unity of Polynesia

The comparative orientation of Polynesian anthropology effectively high-

lights questions of the nature of the anthropological entities, such as local

'cultures', which constitute the units to be compared. This orientation itself

arises from the perception of Polynesia as a diverse but fundamentally

unitary area. This view developed originally in the course of Captain Cook's

expeditions, which visited most of the larger island groups, and initiated

contact with many. The physical similarities between the 'copper-coloured'

people were notable, but a great deal else could be seen to be shared: the

cultivation of root crops such as yams and taro; an orientation towards the

sea manifested in a variable reliance on fishing, and well-constructed canoes;

items of material culture - found to some extent in common forms and

designs - such as adzes, bark cloth, and wooden bowls, which were collected

by early voyagers in great quantities; and elaborate deference and rank

distinctions associated with 'kings' and 'royal' families. The understanding

of indigenous religion was especially uneven in the late eighteenth century,

but notions of 'taboo' and 'superior beings' (Cook [1967]: 179) were

recognized to be pervasive.1

The postulation of unity facilitated internal comparison, and discussion of

variants on the basis of better known cases. In the introductory matter to the

account of the voyage of the Duff (which between 1796 and 1798 established

the first evangelical missions in the Pacific) it is explained that, 'to avoid

tautology' (i.e. repetition) in the brief descriptions of various islands, 'the

points wherein they vary from Otaheite are principally insisted on' (Wilson

1799: vi). There is subsequently much comparative discussion: the Tongans

'had less cloth, but more matting than the Georgian Islanders' (i.e. the

Tahitians); 'the power of the chiefs is more despotic at Tongataboo,

although exercised with less outrage to private property' (ibid: xlix, liii; cf.

383-6). Johann Reinhold Forster, who accompanied Cook on his second

voyage, subsequently published a discursive work (1778) which contained

some four hundred pages of comparative ethnographic discussion of this

kind. The pattern of divergence in unity emerged most directly from the

discussion of language. It was immediately apparent that many words, such

as ariki (chief), mate (sickness, death), kai (food), and the numbers were the

same or similar across wide areas (Banks [1962] II: 35-7). It was further

noted that the differences partly reflected regular consonant shifts: tapu

became kapu in Hawaiian, tangata (Maori for person) kanaka, and so on.

These variations were frequently illustrated in tabular form - most ex-

29

MICRONESIA

POLYNESIAN

OUTLIERS

/EQUATORIAL IS

*

/

/Fanninug

Pukapuka

'"MAROUE SAS

FJutuna/Uvea '

*

/SAMOA

FIJI, Ntuatoputapu SOCIETY IS rAOUI

Is

~x.

ONGACOOK IS

N E W'TONGAMangareva

AUTALACAEONAMangana

ASRLACLDNA/AUSTRAL IS

/ emdcPOLYNESIA

EASTER

Raw' Pitcairn H"enderson 9ii

The Oceanic region, showing the Polynesian Triangle, Polynesian Outliers, and major islands and

archipelagos (from Patrick Vinton Kirch, The evolution of the Polynesian chiefdoms, Cambridge, 1984).

The background to Polynesian anthropology

tensively by Forster - and reflect the most systematic aspect of the early

European understanding of Polynesia.

The idea was thus that one 'race' or 'nation' had spread itself across the

Pacific, reaching 'the large country of New Zealand' and even having made

'a surprising stretch to the solitary spot called Easter Island'. These

'astonishing migrations' were thought by some to have arisen 'from designs

of conquest' (Wilson 1799: lxxxv; cf. Cook [1961]: 354). All this is described

in a very eighteenth-century way, but the basic insights remain far more

credible than those of any other diffusionist scheme. Modern linguistic and

archaeological research has strengthened and specified the notion that the

inhabitants of the various Polynesian islands are descended from a group

speaking an Austronesian language in eastern Melanesia which moved into

Fiji and western Polynesia before 3,000 years ago - although continuity

rather than 'racial' difference with Melanesia would now be stressed

(Bellwood 1978; Kirch 1984; Kirch and Green 1987).

The significance of an apparently isolated region of discrete island societies

which were at once closely related yet distinct in specific ways was not lost

for long on speculative social theorists:

The Islands of the South Seas present a spectacle of extraordinary interest to the moral

and political philosopher. While certain principles of polity are common to them all,

there are striking diversities everywhere apparent. Organization existed in various

degrees of completeness, and despotism in divers states of strength; and both might

be taken as the index of the exact stage that a people had reached in the march

towards civilization.

(Campbell 1840: 474)

The darker skin, less-civilized appearance, and absence of hierarchical

organization among the inhabitants of New Holland (Australia), New

Guinea, New Caledonia, and so on, made them seem clearly different to the

Polynesians to the east. However, the distinction between the two regions

was less sharply drawn in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the

whole area was usually alluded to as 'the South Seas' and Melanesian islands

such as those comprising the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and New

Caledonia were often called 'western Polynesia'. The rigidified Melanesia-

Polynesia opposition, defined in its modern form by Dumont D'Urville

(1832; cf. Hale 1846), became much more widely accepted around the

beginning of this century: the Fijian group, which was clearly a somewhat

embarrassing overlap, marked the easternmost part of Melanesia, everything

beyond that being Polynesia, which of course included New Zealand. An

equally spurious boundary was drawn between the Ellice Islands (now

Tuvalu) and 'Micronesian' atolls to the north-west.

The notion that the Polynesian populations were racially distinct from

their darker neighbours to the west prompted a great deal of diffusionist

speculation about their 'origins', which were traced to various higher south-

east Asian civilizations. The more extravagant varieties of this literature

31

The background to Polynesian anthropology

blossomed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (e.g. Fornander

1878-80) but the set of concerns persisted in more restrained archaeological

discussion until recently.

Much nineteenth-century writing on the Pacific was more localized,

drawing on personal knowledge rather than library snippets, and only

indirectly reflecting larger evolutionist or diffusionist conceptions. Some

books, such as the missionary George Turner's Samoa a hundred years ago

and long before (1884), were primarily discursive accounts of beliefs and

mythology; others, like William Churchward's My consulate in Samoa

(1887), revolved more around an individual's experiences and observations

(in that case, from an official's perspective).

Twentieth-century anthropological perceptions

The anthropological knowledge of Polynesia as a region is unusual in that

until recently it derived less from a haphazard array of individual studies

done at different times than from a systematic effort by one body - the

Honolulu-based Bishop Museum, which aimed to describe all Polynesian

cultures. The effort began in 1920 and carried on through the thirties. The

emphasis in research and publication was manifestly on data rather than

interpretation, but an underlying diffusionist framework was occasionally

made more explicit (e.g. Handy 1930). This perspective was strongest

amongst ethnologists such as Peter Buck and E. S. C. Handy who were

permanently associated with the museum; work was also published by others

such as Alfred Metraux and Margaret Mead who had different concerns but

a broadly similar Boasian and particularist orientation. Raymond Firth's

monumental sequence of Tikopia studies was exceptional in that it was one

of very few British structural-functional contributions to Polynesian

anthropology.2 It was also unusual in that the ethnographic vision was

focussed virtually exclusively on the society studied: although Firth used the

ethnography to discuss general anthropological issues in many papers,

references to comparative Polynesian materials and debates are few and far

between.

In the 1950s anthropologists to whom scientific metaphors came naturally

began to speak of Polynesia as a 'laboratory' for studies of controlled

comparison (Goodenough 1957). This was, of course, a refinement of the sort

of notion enunciated by John Campbell in 1840. The perception was applied

in the fullest way by Marshall Sahlins in his early book Social stratification

in Polynesia (1958) which drew on the ecological perspectives of Leslie White

and Julian Steward. Sahlins argued that the Polynesian societies could be

divided into two categories, 'ramage systems' and 'descent line systems',

which reflected ecological adaptations to different island types. This study

was very influential in American neo-evolutionary anthropology, but was

32

The background to Polynesian anthropology

widely criticized on empirical grounds. At about the same time Irving

Goldman (1955) put forward an argument from a less determinist

perspective, emphasizing aristocratic competition (or 'status rivalry') which

was seen to produce a pattern of evolutionary changes in leadership, social

organization and rank distinctions. The article was subsequently expanded

into Ancient Polynesian society (1970), which added a mass of detail but

retained a relatively simple overall thesis. In the longer run neither Sahlins'

nor Goldman's core arguments have stood up, although elements of both

retain currency. Sahlins' early work perhaps suffered particularly from

changing theoretical fashions, since the vigorous ecological materialism the

book typified only retained credibility among archaeologists, some of whom

have also, more recently, adopted a more 'social' perspective, while

maintaining an interest in larger processes of development and trans-

formation (Kirch 1984, 1986 [ed.]).

A history of Polynesian studies - which this book is not - would have to

discuss many other writers and particular tendencies. If the regional

specialists' debate about Sahlins' 1958 book had not already been exhaustive,

a critique of evolutionary analysis would have to pay as much attention to

that as to the work of Goldman. Ancient Polynesian society is in some ways

an intricate work, and certainly is one which reveals the ambiguities and

elisions inherent in the encounter between one sort of anthropology and a

problematic body of evidence. Primarily for this reason, but also because

there is still no clear consensus as to how substantial a contribution

Goldman's book in fact is, I discuss it, rather than Social stratification in

Polynesia, at some length. Sahlins' book however suffered from many of the

same weaknesses in the use of sources, and one line of my general argument

- that ahistorical biases in evidence have ramifications for subsequent

interpretation - could have been developed in relation to either work.

Goldman's main sources were the ethnographic bulletins of the Bishop

Museum - which also were used by many other writers, such as those who

drew the more centralized Polynesian societies into models of the

development of the 'early' state (e.g. Claessen and Skalnik 1981; Service

1975; cf. Ortner 1981). I therefore go back to these and attempt to tease out

some of the more general concepts behind museum anthropology, specifically

the ideas relating to the constitution of the object of 'native culture' and the

sorts of evidence which have a bearing on it. Some of these arguments could

be extended to other bodies of museum anthropology, such as the Siberian

and North American Indian work of the American Museum of Natural

History (much of which was more directly controlled or influenced by Boas)

- but it is not my purpose to delineate the contours of the whole genre.3 The

point is rather that there are complicit relations of theory and evidence in

these texts which offer themselves as mere reports; the implicit interpreta-

tions, which are not really separable from the evidence, are inherited by other

33

The background to Polynesian anthropology

writers who draw from these data quarries. This process whereby a covert

analysis is transmitted into another account is examined through Goldman's

use of a bulletin concerning the Marquesas Islands. The other side of this

argument is a positive reinterpretation of some patterns of change in eastern

Polynesia; this establishes that a different use of evidence can demand a

distinct evolutionary model, and, more specifically, that the use of

archaeological evidence can help bypass one of the most general problems of

evolutionary anthropology - namely, that while it pretends to deal with

temporal processes it in fact does little more than use temporal metaphors to

make discriminations within certain kinds of comparative or classificatory

social models.

34

4

An evolutionary argument and its sources

The societies of the Pacific Islands and especially Polynesia have often been

used to illustrate arguments about social evolution and, in cases such as

Hawaii, the development of 'early' states. Irving Goldman's Ancient

Polynesian society was the most sustained study of this kind; it attempted a

detailed analysis of evidence concerning eighteen Polynesian groups, and

formulated evolutionary categories more founded on local variation than

universal schema. Much of Goldman's massive work consisted of pres-

entation and discussion of evidence relating to the eighteen societies he

studied. Although questions were raised about sources and interpretations by

specialists (Howard 1972), Ancient Polynesian society rapidly acquired the

status of a sourcebook on Polynesia, which (as one writer expressed it) did

'much to document and clarify' the Polynesian societies (Friedman 1981:

278).1 The perhaps unfashionable character of the argument thus does not

detract from the book's continuing influence in shaping academic perceptions

of the region. Some sections of the text consist of extensive and intricate

discussions of particular matters, such as kin terminology and lineage

economics, but the overall argument can readily be summarised. The object

of analysis is the Polynesian 'status system' and its evolution. 'Principles of

status', principles that define worth, are seen, in the Polynesian case, to give

'direction to the social structure as a whole' (Goldman 1970: 5-7). The

cornerstone of the argument is a classification of Polynesian societies into

three categories, traditional, open and stratified:

The Traditional is essentially a religious system headed by a sacred chief and given

stability by a religiously sanctioned gradation of worth. In the second system, which

I call 'Open,' seniority has been modified to allow military and political effectiveness

to govern status and political control. The Open system is more strongly political than

religious, and stability in it must be maintained more directly by the exercise of

secular powers. In the Open, status differences are no longer regularly graded but tend

to be sharply defined. Finally, the third system, which I call' Stratified,' is characterized

by clearcut breaks in status that are far-reaching in their impact upon everyday life.

In the Stratified system, status differences are economic and political. High ranks hold

the rule and possess the land titles: the commoners are subjects and are landless.

(1970: 20)

35

An evolutionary argument and its sources

The developmental process linking these stages entails shifting combinations

of status and power:

In Traditional societies, status is dominant and power is subordinate; in the Open

societies, power is dominant and status is subordinate; in the Stratified societies,

status and power are at an approximately even level but both are more consequential

than in the Traditional societies. Taking Polynesian society as a whole, it is evident

that the central issue is the steady growth in power.

(1970: 22)

'Status' and 'power' - glossed further as 'honour' and 'control' - therefore

seem to be complementary substances, which are distinguished simply 'at a

cultural level'. Their respective importance varies; neither is constituted as

more fundamental (1970: 21-2).

The body of the text consists of extensive presentation of the data in terms

of the attributes of the three different categories, with emphasis upon

contrasts between different cases which reveal the larger progressive

movement. The ordering of the examples through which these types or stages

and the evolutionary process are expressed bears a problematic relationship

to any actual historical developments: the society of the New Zealand Maori

is set up as the original condition, yet even in simple geographic and

prehistoric terms, New Zealand would have to be seen as a late and marginal

extension of Polynesian society2 (in rather the same way as some uncharitable

people might see contemporary white New Zealand as a late and marginal

extension of English culture).

Evolution and time

This question relates to some larger problems about the way the evolutionary

process is conceived. The line taken in Ancient Polynesian society on this

crucial point is in fact rather obscure. Goldman says that his sequence is

'hypothetical and approximate' (1970: 27). The first term suggests that what

we are offered is essentially a model of social forms, perhaps divorced from

their exemplifications, while the second implies that an attempt is made to

reconstruct an actual sequence. Goldman maintains at one point that we

cannot 'establish the precise rank order of eastern or western Polynesian

societies'; that he has 'asked rather whether variations in status systems and

related social structure have moved in some order of regularity from

Traditional to Open and Stratified' (1970: 27). It is unclear, however, what

concept of 'rank order' is rejected and how this would differ from the 'order

of regularity' which is put forward as a legitimate object. He further suggests

that 'the history of diffusion of Polynesian culture has no direct bearing upon

the attempt to reconstruct Polynesian social evolution' because 'societies are

not ordinarily caught in arrested development'; that is, the Polynesian

societies on islands with longer settlement histories have undergone local

change and evolution. 'Diffusion' would thus be connected with 'social

36

An evolutionary argument and its sources

evolution' via an assumption that oldest settled places have not changed

since other groups moved on, and that therefore these places reflect earlier

stages in the histories of more newly settled places. Such an approach is

avoided because it would immediately encounter problems in Polynesia,

where some of the islands with the longest settlement histories, such as

Samoa and Tonga, were also those which were the most hierarchical at the

time of contact. The rejection of this sort of notion permits the analysis to be

free of located historical change: 'evolution' seems to take place on some

distinct level. But Goldman adds that

Maori history, suggesting a branching from an early form of the Society Islands'

social system, actually gives a historical foundation to the morphological view; Maori

has some authenticity as an early social system.

(1970: 27)

There is certainly ambiguity if not absolute contradiction here. While Maori

society may have changed in various minor respects, the 'structure' is seen

as an existing (in the late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century period)

manifestation of an early form. 'Arrested development' may not be

mentioned, but a certain structural immobility is this argument's condition

of existence: some societies reflect earlier moments in the histories of others,

spatial variation reflecting temporal change. La recherche du temps perdu is

then simply a matter of looking to another island.3 A problem in interpreting

Goldman's implicit logic arises here from the ambiguity of words such as

'divergence'. While this may be used loosely to indicate difference from a

case already discussed, it strongly connotes change from some point in

common. It is precisely this sort of creative confusion which allows

Goldman's text to half covertly deploy concepts which have been explicitly

banished. Thus the societies described not only represent a type such as

'traditional' but also provide images and reference points for the earlier

histories of more advanced forms.

The ambiguity is therefore not some straightforward product of poor

exposition, but rather reflects a basic shift which draws on a classically

evolutionist spatialization of time (or temporalization of space), but which

simultaneously frees the author from the obligation of linking this to any

historical transformations. He retains the strategy of representing certain

societies as archaic forms of others, but selects these on the basis of

theoretical criteria rather than prehistoric depth.

The status of time in evolutionary discourse is therefore considerably more

uncertain and ambiguous than one might initially have supposed. One

presupposes that evolution is a temporal process, but it seems rather that the

variation discussed is purely geographical. The Hawaiian system is compared

with Tikopia and Easter Island societies. One sort of temporal difference is

suppressed, in the sense that the sources relate to reconstructions of late

eighteenth-century Hawaii, to Tikopia in 1928-29, and to nineteenth-century

37

An evolutionary argument and its sources

Easter Island. These temporal locations are homogenized; each society as

variously known is treated as an end-point of indigenous Polynesian

evolutionary processes, which have generated a product independent of

European movement into the area. The differences are not relevant to the

construction of the argument, which rather sets up oppositions or continuities

between socio-geographic referents: ' Maori', 'the new Hawaiian principle of

leadership', and so on.

At another level, evolutionary argument uses a temporal metaphor to

colour or valorize relationships which have no actual temporal content. This

device of anthropological writing relates to the broader nature of

comparative statements, which tend always to be charged or loaded in some

way. If one notes that masks are used in male initiations in one place but not

in another, one simply sets up a bland contrast, a marking of presence and

absence. One might equally notice different house types or forms of dress.

But regional contrasts almost never have this undirected, uncoloured

character. 'Pre-anthropological' descriptions of native people notably

construct types and systematic differences: small black pagan hill tribesmen

('bush kanakas') versus taller, lighter skinned Christian coastal groups; the

civilization of the Andes versus the savagery of the Amazon - in every

colonized region such differences were created or encoded. Particular

attributes become resonant of more fundamental differences, such as the

degree of primitiveness.

Traits or local features relate to more general differences in a similar way

in more 'scientific' forms of anthropological knowledge. Variation is

important because certain mechanisms or correlations are proposed which

have some causal or functional effect, which is distinctly expressed or worked

out in different cases. For example, I. M. Lewis has argued that spirit

possession frequently provides a means for oppressed or deprived groups

such as women to exert pressure upon or attack the dominant group (Lewis

1986: 23-50).4 Once a claim of this kind has been made, either on the basis

of ethnographic descriptions or theoretical expectations, further ethno-

graphic material cannot be introduced in a neutral way. Particular facts are

already charged by their relationship to prior assertions, and amount to

extensions, modifications or converse illustrations. There are 'parallel

instances' in Tanzania, 'analogous

phenomena ... among the Ba-

Thonga ... and Zulu'; 'the Hausa bori cult ... is a similar though more

elaborate affair' (Lewis 1986: 36-7). The argument thus has the effect of

recreating the whole field of ethnographic evidence as a set of potential

confirmations or disconfirmations. This applies as much to debates as to

individual texts, and one body of material, such as Kachin ethnography, may

be linked with a particular stance (a dynamic functionalism [Leach 1954]) or

critique (Friedman's structural-Marxist challenge to ecological materialism

and functionalism [1972]); other cases like ' Mead's Samoa' may have status

38

An evolutionary argument and its sources

as examples of particular gender relations. There is also the sense in which

certain bodies of evidence acquire the status of 'test cases' for particular

perspectives: Ian Langham has discussed the significance of the Ambrymese

six-section kinship system for the Rivers-Haddon 'social organization'

school from this angle (1981: 200-43).

Factual materials may therefore have very dense associations with

particular arguments, but these are likely to be generally recognized: it is

apparent that the distinct value of examples in a specific analysis such as

Lewis's is constituted through his argument. The cases have a prior

theoretical character simply because they are derived from ethnographic

accounts, but they do not already have the precise charge or value which

arises in particular formulations. In evolutionary discourse, on the other

hand, the temporal metaphor imbues examples with value in a manner which

is at once less explicit and more forceful. In Goldman's book there is no

particular argument for the inclusion of such-and-such a society in the

'open' or the 'stratified' category. The classification apparently relates to

unproblematic features of the groups themselves. It is thus the case that the

temporal 'place' of a particular society is understood as one of its properties,

rather than as something specified in an argument. The societies' hypothetical

'rank order' is merely an elaboration and articulation of a description

saturated with temporal metaphors. In this case, the representation of quasi-

temporal status is not usually explicit: societies are not frequently described

as 'early', 'late', or 'advanced', but the writing effects such an understanding

through many more particular allusions. In the stratified society of

Mangareva, for example, we find institutional 'improvisations' and

'innovations'. The early vernacular traditions depict, according to Goldman,

'a traditional society well along the road to a new social order' (1970: 153,

162, 163). The former state was, of course, the traditional system, exemplified

by such cases as New Zealand, which are represented almost as the absence

of improvisations - just as in more general and ideological social classi-

fications, 'primitive' societies are recognized negatively through the absences

of writing, the state and money, rather than on the basis of any positive

attributes.

Evolutionary movements are defined in a way which supposes certain

deeply seated and largely implicit notions. The traditional society is just that

- one which is structured on the whole by tradition. Rank and hierarchy are

defined by a cultural order which has some arbitrary basis - in this case, birth

order - which is restrictive in the sense that this ranking, rather than personal

attributes, largely determines one's life and social standing. However, just

like such culturally captured subjects, these ideas are not themselves free of

genealogy. They can be traced back to a much broader and certainly very

much cruder set of notions in European discourses about custom-bound

primitives and their resistance to innovation (e.g. Thomson 1908: vii).

39

An evolutionary argument and its sources

Although Goldman does not postulate immobility, the traditional order

privileges conformity to an ascribed order, thereby circumscribing fluidity

and individual rivalry.

Legitimacy alone poses conflicting genealogical claims upon the [chiefly] title ... while

legitimacy does provide an active channel for status rivalry, it seemingly has the

means for controlling the consequences of status rivalry ... Genealogical disputes

serve to expand the segmental organization and broaden the opportunities for rank.

They do not transform the traditional system.

(1970: 61)

The specifically problematic feature of the legacy of these ideas is that the

movement from traditional to open is almost one from restriction to

freedom. The open systems are 'loosened up', as it were: 'Power rather than

rank' is the key constituent of status (1970: 85-6). Marquesan craft

specialists almost embody western notions of aptitude-based social mobility:

'They had enormous prestige and good prospects for becoming wealthy and

thus politically powerful' (1970: 136). Goldman saw the Marquesan system

'as the prototype of the Open society. It insists upon few givens, and leaves

the field wide open for attainment' (1970: 142). The ideologically charged

opposition between an ultimately constraining cultural order and the creative

force of deregulated individual agency hardly requires further comment here

(but cf. Thomas 1985: 224). The problem is that the force of the notion of

opening up society to attainment is such that specific questions about the

transformations of one system into another, which is perhaps only

incidentally more 'fluid', are submerged. The stress upon the ordering role of

'tradition' (or specifically genealogical rank) tends to preclude serious

consideration of the dynamics of systems which are never entirely

encompassed by their apparently inflexible cultural orders. Equally, the

emphasis on attainment and fluidity tends to erase certain forms of rigidity

or structural inequality which are somctimes precisely the preconditions of

'equality of opportunity'. This is to introduce a contemporary political

vocabulary, but the point is precisely that political analyses of distant peoples

often play upon or are seduced by the elisions and reifications of our own

meanings.

Since in the stratified system the chiefly hierarchy seems to recover and

centralize the extended and developed forms of power characteristic of open

societies, the whole sequence amounts to a dialectic: the opposition between

the traditional and open forms is overcome in the stratified. In many

scattered descriptive passages, Goldman identifies diversity - among distinct

open societies, for instance - but this is somehow never systematically drawn

into the model. In fact, these forays are almost suppressed. Much of the

chapter on Samoa, for instance, emphasizes a distinctive development, a

locally peculiar form of an open system, which seemingly had its own path

somewhere away from the grand road towards the stratified system.

40

An evolutionary argument and its sources

Differences between eastern (now American) Samoan and western Samoan

patterns are noted, and it is suggested that the Manu'an pattern of rivalry

was a 'more subtle version of "openness"' (1970: 245), that there was much

'dilution of the sources of access to sacred powers' (1970: 254). In

introducing the discussion of Tonga, these points are set aside: Tonga

'carried forward a political evolution that in western Samoa, for example,

was still incomplete' (1970: 280). Difference here is reduced to a kind of

collective failure; it is as though the non-stratified systems exist toward the

stratified system, even though the text's own discussion of Samoa points to

something other. The book as a whole is almost like the political life of a city

- there are all sorts of small-scale, discrete or loosely connected projects, with

a peculiar or perverse thread of argument, a local claim; the whole is

unevenly colonized by a larger argument, which like a mass political party

covers but fails to absorb or reflect the many distinct arguments, tactics and

projects of its field of activity, its object of discourse.

Museum anthropology plays evidence

The configuration of Goldman's analysis derives both from his theoretical

notions and from the sources he draws upon. Any argument or analytic

mode makes a range of assumptions about what can constitute 'data', about

what will do and what will not. Facts may be statistics or generalizations

about practice (the incidence of a form of marriage), quoted observations, or

quotations from participants in the situation studied ('Women think that the

pigs they rear will be theirs to eat later'). In some cases a proposition may

be seen as significant in itself; in other instances, knowledge about context is

demanded, but whether this context is semantic, historical or practical

obviously varies. The constitution of what is acceptable as information thus

encodes an argument's premises and may even incorporate aspects of what

appear to be 'subsequent' interpretations. Hypotheses appear to be

consequent upon an interaction of data and theory but can instead simply

enunciate judgements and relationships created in the form of the evidence.

I shall show that the interpretive burden of the 'raw data' of museum

anthropology was in fact considerable.

An evaluation of the sources drawn into a comparative study or theory can

amount to a critique simply because the weaknesses of the sources fracture

the edifice 'based' upon them. One critical review of Ancient Polynesian

society was subtitled 'Reflections on castles built of sand (and a few bits of

coral)' (Howard 1972). The metaphor of argument as a building more or less

securely erected on or grounded in facts which are ideally bedrock but

sometimes shifting, is familiar but quite misleading in its radical separation

of raw material and structure. Forms of evidence and analysis tend to be

mutually implicated in an implicit and almost surreptitious way. The force of

41

An evolutionary argument and its sources

Table 1. Goldman's sources

Island/group

Main sources

Maori

Manihiki/Rakahanga (Cook Is.)

Tongareva (Cook Is.)

Mangaia

Easter Island

Marquesas

Mangareva

Society Islands

Hawaii

Samoa

Tonga

Uvea

Futuna

Tokelaus

Tikopia

Pukapuka

Niue

Ontong Java

Best, Buck,a Firth (1929)

Buck (1932a)b

Buck (1932b)b

Buck (1934),b Gilla

M6traux (1940)d

E. S. C. Handy (1923)b

Buck (1938)b

Henry (1928),c'a Handy, (1930)b Ellis

(1829), Adams (1947)

Fornander (1878-80), Kamakau (1964),

Malo (1951), Handy and Pukui

(1958), a.o.

Mead (1930),' Stair (1897), Turner

(1884)

Gifford (1929),b Martin (1827)

Burrows (1937)d

Burrows (1936)d

Macgregor (1937)6

Firth (1936) a.o.

Beaglehole and Beaglehole (1938)b

Loeb (1926)d

Hogbin (1931) a.o.

a.o. = among others

a Several works - see Goldman for full references.

SBishop Museum research published by the Bishop Museum.

c Henry's work is an exceptional case in that it was compiled from some of the papers of her

grandfather, the missionary J. M. Orsmond, who was active in the Society Islands from 1818 to

1856.

d Research by temporary associate of the Bishop Museum, but published by the Museum and

therefore reflecting the standard form of the Bulletins.

argument arises frequently from unexamined metaphors, rather than from

overt claims.

Evidence and argument seem especially to be each other's shadows in

Goldman's book, which draws on a distinct and restricted range of sources.

Although stray references are made to the publications of early voyagers

such as Cook

and

de Bougainville, to

missionary memoirs

'beachcomber' books like William Mariner's Tonga Islands, the accounts of

particular islands and island groups depend heavily upon the ethnographic

bulletins of the Bishop Museum (see table 1).5

42

and

An evolutionary argument and its sources

Ethnographic totalization and the erasure of history

Museum anthropology was an enterprise conducted by institutions which

were usually at least as concerned with natural history. The setting of the

work, and the fact that practitioners were often initially trained in natural

science subjects, made for some equation between native cultures and other

phenomena studied by museums. These exist as assemblages of elements

distributed across space which are to be observed, recorded, and, if possible,

collected by competent researchers. Artifacts, plants and fossils are, of

course, objects rather than agents: the traits and elements of a culture are

likewise the primary things to be known. It may be the case that natives have

been actively engaged in the creation of an ethnographic depiction of their

society, but this is an uncomplicated process which feeds into the procedure

of trained description.

Ethnographic phenomena are classified in a sort of grid which is seen to

cover the totality, but is not thought of as a problematic or theoretically-

laden set of categories which come to constitute the 'data'. Rather it is simply

a set of headings under which material (naturally) falls. There is in fact some

continuity between museum work on natural phenomena and ethnology,

since archaeology and material culture studies dealt with inanimate objects

such as houses, boats and stone remains which might fall into manifestly

discrete functional or morphological classes. Since physical anthropology or

anthropometry was also an area of endeavour, ethnology proper would

certainly have been the odd subject out if the approach of objectified

classification had not been extended into social and cultural domains. The

substantial number of broadly ethnographic Bishop Museum bulletins

therefore organise information into short sections and subsections under a

roughly standardised pattern of headings: Introduction (with a very brief

account of the circumstances of field research); Geography (basic in-

formation on island size, climate, etc., and often impressionistic statements

about the abundance or otherwise of a particular island's or group's

resources); European contact (usually dealt with very briefly); Traditional

history (sometimes presented in considerable genealogical and mythical

detail, depending on the adequacy of the material); followed by accounts of

many more specific matters - 'Social Organization', 'Titles', 'Rank',

'Religion', 'The Priesthood', 'Warfare', 'Individual in Society', subdivided

under 'Birth', 'Infancy', 'Puberty', and so on (sometimes 'Marriage' would

be dealt with in this context, sometimes under 'Kinship' or 'The Family').

In some cases, much of a report might be devoted to various elements of

material culture, but in cases of larger islands or island groups, this was

usually published separately. The specific ordering of sections varied, but in

any instance matters which others might think to be closely linked, such as

43

An evolutionary argument and its sources

'Chiefs' and 'Regalia' or 'Ritual' are found to be segregated under larger

headings such as 'Social Organization' and 'Religion' (e.g. Buck 1934).

The classificatory approach did not, of course, permit space for the

analysis or interpretation of social relations as a total system or social

dynamics. Thus general statements might be made in passing about such

matters as the importance of warfare in the pursuit of prestige, but systemic

links were not elaborated upon: the general view is conveyed in occasional

impressionistic passages, while connections between warfare and production,

and the importance of control over land, or the identifications between

warrier-chiefs and mythical figures are, for example, very much cut about

and buried. And while a certain, rather superficial comparison of institutions

between different islands is facilitated, a sense of the differences between

larger systems is most difficult to derive from the bulletins. This stems partly

from a resistance even to a rudimentary holism, which is manifested in

Buck's almost sarcastic comparison between functionalism and what he

described as the Museum's 'historical method'. He evidently thought that

the functional method involved the 'limiting of inquiry into the case histories

of individual lives' and 'ignoring the bondage of the historical past'. While

the latter point was justified, the former implies a complete lack of familiarity

with the literature. Apparently with The sexual life of savages in mind, he

noted censoriously that 'more importance appears to be attached to the

intimate details of the technique of coitus and its various postures than to the

technical details involved in the construction of a canoe and making it move'

(1945: 127). The uncompromising empiricism and ignorance of functional

theory betrayed here was probably shared by the other museum ethnologists,

but some of the outsiders like Mead and Metraux who wrote bulletins on the

basis of temporary museum fellowships had more up-to-date views;

Burrows, for instance, was interested in the conjunction of internal processes

and environmental factors in the process of 'cultural differentiation' (1939;

cf. Kirch 1984: 9-10). But the more explicitly analytical work of these writers

tended to be developed later, outside the framework of museum publication;

in the bulletins themselves the descriptive endeavour was certainly seen in all

cases as an untheoretical exercise. The project of ethnology was not to be

reduced to some partial or motivated interpretation, grounded in a set of

intellectual interests, but rather entailed a total appropriation in knowledge

of the object: the task was to capture and authoritatively depict the cultures

of a group of islands.6

The objective of work was 'a complete survey of the Polynesian people'

(Buck 1945: 50). The aim was, however, qualified:' to gain a picture of native

culture as it existed before the changes due to foreign contact began to take

place' (ibid: 125). Although the importance of studying what was called

'acculturation' was acknowledged, there was an insistence upon the prior

need to know the aboriginal system in its pure form: 'in the study of a

44

An evolutionary argument and its sources

vanishing culture, a picture of what the culture was is required before it can

be determined what has vanished and what remains' (1945: 126). This

statement reflects an extremely simple notion of what culture contact and

colonial confrontations have meant. What is native is simply in a process of

fading away. It may be less visible, but it has not apparently changed through

accommodation, reaction or adaptation to new conditions, nor does

transformation seem to consist of anything more than displacement.

Indigenous culture exists in a quantity which is reduced more or less

according to the degree of foreign influence, so that by a certain date there

may be 'a little' or 'very little' left to observe (e.g. E. S. C. Handy 1923: 4-5;

Thompson 1940: 5; cf. Goldman's usage, 1970: 126, 319, 329, 379-80, 396).'

This notion is especially understandable in eastern Polynesia, where

depopulation and colonial strategies among other factors did have a

shattering impact on indigenous institutions. However, the fading of presence

into absence implies a highly restricted and unsatisfactory conception of

change, even if a certain historical period saw some institutions or customs

abandoned or forgotten. Another metaphor of Buck's suggests a somewhat

different idea:

At the late period of a recent study, however, the true native picture had been

obscured by the accretions of over a century of contact with a foreign culture. Here

again, the historical method [i.e. the study of myths, genealogies and legends] was

useful in clearing off the layers which covered the stone age stratum beneath.

(Buck, 1945: 126)

In this formula practices such as Christian marriage are additions which can

be subtracted from the untruth to produce the truth. Goldman expresses a

distinct variant of this notion when he notes that, despite the ravages of

European contact on the populations of Uvea and the Tokelaus, 'domestic

or household culture' could still be observed and recorded (1970: 319, 341).

This is to suppose that because families, as opposed to non-Christian rituals,

for example, still existed, these were an untransformed remnant of early

culture. In fact, the activities of missions and colonial processes have led to

transformations of gender relations and domestic groups across the Pacific

(Jolly and Macintyre 1988; Thomas 1987).

There is in all these conceptions an overall dichotomy between 'native

culture' which has a unitary existence and the various effects of foreign

contact. The complete disconnection is brought out at one point in Burrows's

Ethnology of Uvea, which incorporates most of a traditional narrative

compiled by a Catholic priest.8 The latter part of the text is, however, not

reproduced, because it 'treats of recent foreign contacts, mainly European,

and throws no light on Uvean culture' (1937: 40). These matters seem

remarkably clear cut!

Although pure native culture is apparently understood as what existed

45

An evolutionary argument and its sources

before contact, the point of this definition is not historical specificity but

simply the absence of foreign contamination. Social relations in the Society

Islands in the 1760s (just before the islanders were encountered by Captain

Wallis and his 'outriggerless canoe' as the ship, the Dolphin, was perceived)

are of no particular interest in themselves. The 'native culture' prior to

contact is thus an amorphous and atemporal category, quite unlike 'Tahiti

in the 1970s' or 'Augustan Rome'. Nor is there ever any attempt to

reconstruct the political affairs - particular conflicts, individuals' and

lineages' situations and strategies - of a certain time, although such

information might fill out through specificity and ground in practice a more

general depiction of the 'native culture'. But the crucial feature of this

'native culture' is, of course, neither temporal nor spatial location but

authenticity (cf. Clifford 1988: 232).

The extent to which Buck regarded the exercise as having been successfully

completed by 1945 is quite remarkable:

The field survey of Polynesia has been practically completed. Expeditions under the

auspices of Bishop Museum have done field work in every island group except Easter

Island, Niue, Chatham Island, New Zealand, and the Ellice Islands. Easter Island,

Niue, and Chatham Island were visited by trained anthropologists from other

institutions, but Bishop Museum published the results of their field work. New

Zealand was left to her own capable students. Of the Ellice Islands, the atolls of

Funafuti and Vaitupu have been studied by capable men, but the other atolls in the

group may provide additional material to round off the picture. Thus, for Polynesia

proper, it may be said that the only group now worth a field expedition is the Ellice

Islands. This statement is not meant as a deterrent to people with private means who

may wish to follow up some special project in the field, particularly in acculturation

and psycho-anthropology.

Bishop Museum publications of the field studies have practically covered every

phase of anthropology in history, legends, material culture, social organization,

religion, and physical anthropology. Though the information may be thin in parts,

such weaknesses are not due to the authors but to the fact that the native informants

could not supply what they did not have. The information supplied by present-day

informants was supplemented by earlier information contained in old native

manuscripts, and the published literature was carefully combed for additional

information. Thus, the data on each island group has been brought up-to-date and

will save students the tiresome task of searching through other works which may not

be available to them. Though I may be suspected of bias, I consider that the regional

survey of Polynesia has been well done and that Bishop Museum publications may

be regarded as the authoritative works on this area.

(1945: 123-4)

An 'authoritative' work makes a claim to power, and there are many points

at which Buck implicitly asserts the Museum's monopoly over the knowing

of Polynesia. Great value is attached to any work done specifically by Bishop

Museum staff. The work of other researchers on places such as Easter Island

which the Museum saw fit to publish is evidently almost of the same calibre.

The possibility that these studies are less than definitive is excluded. The only

further projects countenanced are those on particular topics such as

46

An evolutionary argument and its sources

'acculturation', but these are of such a trivial nature that 'people with

private means' are those who might like to pursue them - presumably Buck

thought that research funds might be better directed elsewhere. He indicates

that not only are field projects complete but that 'the published literature'

was searched for further information, and that students no longer need waste

time searching for dusty volumes.9

It is usually freely acknowledged by the authors of the ethnographic

bulletins that oral memories, observed behaviour and published information

are all drawn into the report. While early voyagers' narratives may be

quoted, whole traditional histories reproduced, and individual informants at

times acknowledged, there are many passages where sources are entirely

obscure. In some accounts of marriage and kinship, for example, the past

tense is used generally but not exclusively, and one cannot tell whether

particular practices were observed or were no longer to be observed at the

time of fieldwork; if the latter, one does not know if the report derived from

a local account of what things were like ten years ago, or from a navigator's

observations of the 1840s (e.g. Macgregor 1937: 40f.).

The detemporalized product cannot therefore be considered as auth-

oritative as Buck would wish, especially when the brevity of periods of field

research is considered. Buck's seventeen days on Tongareva stand out as an

insecure basis for an ethnographic report - particularly for one supposedly

encapsulating the truth of the place, obviating the possibility of any further

useful work - but even those who spent longer in the field were rarely there

for more than seven or eight months. The broad experience of some of the

researchers in Polynesia would have meant that they probably learnt

languages very quickly and made much more of a short period than any

apprentice researcher could.'°

Field research methods, as much as the mere brevity of periods of research,

hardly diminish one's reservations about the adequacy of some information

collected. In many cases techniques are not discussed or are mentioned very

briefly, but Buck gave an account of his own main procedure:

The plan I have tried to follow during field expeditions is to call, or sit in at, a meeting

of the people and explain to them that the object of inquiry is to put their history,

traditions, crafts and customs on record for the outside world to appreciate. The

collecting of information becomes a community project, which the people strive to

make as complete as possible. They will indicate the best informants, or the best

informants will indicate themselves.

(1945: 32)

The objective is thus a synthesized corpus, as though there was one correct

account of traditional history and customs. The differences between

informants relate to quality, to more or less perfect knowledge, rather than

to perspective. But in some Polynesian societies chiefly perceptions of society

were certainly not shared by the entire group. There is no effort to sort out

or analyse different viewpoints. In many parts of Polynesia certain groups -

47

An evolutionary argument and its sources

often those located around the best anchorages - acquired a degree of

dominance because they interacted more with Europeans than people on

other parts of an island, or people on other islands within a group. This sort

of centralization, or reorientation of asymmetries, was, of course, a very

general feature of colonial change. Buck's synthetic approach is likely also to

reflect the perceptions from such central or newly central places, rather than

those from other localities. In a western political context this would not

merely be like adding together the perspectives of the Conservative and

Labour parties to produce a picture of a total British political culture, since

it was as though this was done in one constituency which happened to be that

of the Prime Minister.11

Possible entanglements with histories of local asymmetry and uneven

colonialism had prior effects on the context of fieldwork, but at least Buck's

own work was also intimately enmeshed in the continuing intervention of

administration in the local scene, as is apparent from his account of his

Mangaian research:

As a return for the assistance of the Cook Islands Administration, I agreed to act in

the place of the Resident Agent ... during his absence on leave ...

Except for morning sick parades, the weekly court, which occupied less than an

hour, and the monthly paying of civil servants, my official duties made little demand

on my time. In my official position I was authorized to use the resources of the

government in such a way as I deemed expedient. The government, therefore, devoted

its attention to the ethnological survey. The police in the villages acted as assistants

in gathering the people together for the purpose of making head and body

measurements. The district and subdistrict chiefs were called upon to conduct official

visits of inspection through their districts. The maraes and old battlefields were visited

and described by local experts...

(Buck 1934: 3)

On Tongareva he evidently also gained considerable information through

attending land court sittings. Given that information was derived through

public channels rather than confidential interviews, the facts could only

reflect the interests and tactics of particular parties. (Someone such as Buck

who was clearly identified as a friend of certain colonial officials might well

have been unable to get different information through private discussions in

any event.) The sum of various motivated accounts is not some 'whole truth'

but simply a blurred image abstracted from the circumstances of its

production. As feminist critiques have pointed out, the same problem arises

for more recent ethnographic studies of gender relations if it is presupposed

that culture is above all a shared system of meanings; this view can only

suppress competing male and female views. If the object is the 'native

culture' in some generalised sense, there is little room for situational

variation or contested definitions: vocalized dissent becomes 'noise' in the

statisticians' sense of irrelevant complexity. Historical and anthropological

accounts which implicitly suppose that there is a homogenous culture are,

48

An evolutionary argument and its sources

unfortunately, likely to provide support for the elites who manipulate such

ideologies. That, of course, is very convenient for researchers who have no

desire to offend those who control the colonial or post-colonial country being

studied, but is often consistent neither with respectable politics nor good

anthropology.

Goldman offered an evolutionary argument which, despite some irrelevant

and misleading qualifications, reproduced the classic evolutionary view of

social diversity: simpler or less stratified societies are regarded as the

antecedents of more complex and hierarchical systems. Geographical and

historical difference are erased in abstract time, in a master narrative which

is at once linear and progressive. A particular evolutionary story may refrain

from declaring its place in the overall mythic image of the step-by-step

advancement of humanity - a story which distances 'them' from 'us', and

justifies 'their' subordination to 'us' - but the particular tract nevertheless

expresses the ideology in general, and does something to sustain it.

The evolutionary master narrative also imposes something particular upon

the societies it encompasses. It represents them in certain terms, making them

similar to the extent that they seem to be related, yet different enough to

express some transformation or movement from one to the other. This

difference or transformation is not, of course, unmarked variation, mere

dissimilarity, but carries always a directional value. Any difference is thus

either positively or negatively charged: the form of an institution is always

more advanced or developed in one case than another, and thus represents

the 'growth' of something which already exists in an inchoate or primitive

form in the 'earlier' (but in reality contemporaneous) society.

There are a number of ways in which evidence is organized so as to

facilitate this kind of construction. These do not necessarily derive from a

particular effort to distort ethnographic knowledge in a way consistent with

an evolutionary argument, but rather emerge as a result of some specific

methods as well as from certain overall features of anthropological discourse.

In the case of museum work, it is clear that total insensitivity towards

historical factors produces a blurred and generalized depiction of indigenous

social forms and customs. This was exacerbated by the tendency to neglect

variation in space, within island groups and communities. Most museum-

based projects tended to deal with regions, with Siberia or the whole of

Polynesia, and it is therefore likely that the similarities between societies

across the region will be exaggerated. Investigators will fill in their scanty

knowledge of certain localities (which might have been visited briefly) on the

basis of better-known and often hegemonic or central places. There are thus

a variety of tendencies toward homogenization, both within accounts of

particular societies, and within the broader regional group which is being

appropriated within knowledge. Ethnographic data drawn together from a

49

An evolutionary argument and its sources

diffusionist perspective can thus seem dedicated to an evolutionary synthesis.

The ways in which this leads to misconstruction in a particular case are

explored in the next chapter. It is worth emphasizing, though, that the

tendency to 'homogenize' culture has not been superseded, and is almost

certainly more developed in modern anthropological discourse than in the

museum studies I have discussed. If the overall movement of analysis is a

systematizing one toward generalities, toward the underlying principles or

basic properties - whether social or cultural - of a system, then local

variation, historic idiosyncracy, and verbalized or silent dissent can only

subtract from the work of interpretation. 'Ethnology' may have been

displaced by 'anthropology', but in each case the orientation of the discourse

has concealed the actual process of history, but implicitly sustained the larger

chronological scheme of evolution.

50

5

Untying evidence, rethinking

transformations

The notions behind museum ethnography have a general impact on

subsequent syntheses and analyses. The dissociation of 'native culture' from

recent historical change leads, in Goldman's book for instance, to a restricted

and somewhat abstract notion of longer-term evolution which excludes the

short-term dynamics arising from European contact. The latter occupy the

domains of 'social change' and 'acculturation' which cannot speak to

longer-term histories.

There are also more specific connections between the constitution of

particular ahistorical descriptions and elements of interpretation. Interpre-

tations are partly implicit in what becomes 'data', which is seen as external

to argument, and partly also overt in texts such as Goldman's which are

more explicitly analytical exercises. The links are hidden from readers

because it is pretended that a particular text is simply a 'source' which may

contain omissions or even errors but is not laced with interpretation.

These issues are explored through a re-examination of the so-called 'open'

societies, and particularly the cases of Easter Island and the Marquesas

Islands. Ideas are identified in E. S. C. Handy's Bishop Museum publication

which re-emerge in Goldman's account, facilitating a particular evolutionary

argument. Handy's views can be questioned on the basis of early descriptions

of particular social relations, which provide the basis for a different model of

Marquesan society. In conjunction with reinterpretations of political

relations and prehistories of other islands, this leads to quite a different

argument about the 'evolutionary' situation of at least some of the 'open'

societies.

The case of The native culture in the Marquesas

The Bishop Museum research on the Marquesas provides an appropriate test

case, since E. S. C. Handy's ethnographic report could hardly be considered

one of the Museum's slighter publications. Handy was in the Marquesas' for

nine months, from September 1920 to June 1921, with Ralph Linton, who

studied the archaeology and material culture (Linton 1923, 1925) and his

51

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

wife, Willowdean Chatterton Handy, who was described as a 'volunteer

associate', that is, an unpaid researcher. She subsequently published studies

of art and tattooing (1923, 1938) and, much later, an informative popular

account of the Marquesas at the time of the expedition (1965). The period of

field research was thus one of the longest upon which any Bishop Museum

bulletin was based and in fact drew on the efforts of three fieldworkers, as

well as some exceptionally detailed missionary manuscripts.2

Handy's overall image of tribal Marquesan society was of a relatively

egalitarian system which was 'fluid' in the sense that it permitted ambitious

individuals to secure privileged positions. A contrast with more stratified

Polynesian societies such as Hawaii and Tahiti which looked more like

kingdoms and appeared to have possessed more rigid rank structures was

implied. Handy recognized that there was some evidence for a more

hierarchical structure in parts of the group, but attributed this to a distinct

migration - a reflection of a Boasian, diffusionist perspective, which for the

most part was submerged by intricate descriptive ethnography.

Certain emphases in Handy's image of Marquesan society seem to reflect

a disagreement with French writers such as the missionary Delmas who saw

greater inequality in the old indigenous systems, which had been substantially

transformed by the time of Handy's research. Divergent interpretations of

the nature of hierarchy reveal underlying links between source materials,

methods and arguments, as I attempt to show in this section.

Handy reacted particularly against the indiscriminate use of the word

'king' in some accounts of Marquesan life, and stressed that chiefly authority

was limited. He claimed that the reports of some early observers brought 'out

clearly the communism and simple democratic nature of the tribe' (1923:

35).3 The impression of a Russian visitor, Krusenstern, was that should a

chief 'venture to strike anyone, he would infallibly meet with like return'

(Krusenstern 1813: 165, quoted in Handy 1923: 35). This observation about

behaviour or expected behaviour hardly bears upon larger patterns of

respect, authority, or dependence. Unless one saw the capacity to hit subjects

with impunity as a standard chiefly prerogative, the point has little

significance, since there are in many societies people with certain kinds of

power or authority (such as European judges) who would 'meet with like

return' or at least public censure if they assaulted others. But there seems to

be an uncomplicated notion that power is manifested in various ways which

require no contextual specification. Something like the capacity to deploy

violence is simply an indicator which can be observed in various cases and is

automatically significant.

It also seems to be assumed that 'a chief' should be expected to have some

sort of obvious control or authority over all the people of a place. This is

consistent with anthropological constructs of chiefs and, in fact, with what

is more typical in Oceania. The crucial feature of chieftainship was in general

52

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

the chief's ritual work, which alone was the fundamental cause of agricultural

production, successful fishing, and well-being in general. This created a

generalized asymmetry and dependence, which was manifested in a steady

stream of offerings to the chief, most of which tended to be redistributed. The

chief was thus focal and encompassing both in society's self-image and in

practice - or at least in movements of food, which were virtually the

substance of social relations across Oceania. Because this situation was both

more typical, and probably also reflected an ancient common pattern, it is

desirable to evaluate the divergence of specific societies from whatever may

be constructed as a hypothetical ancestral system. But whether or not a

particular case of chieftainship corresponds to one's expectations (on the

basis of what is typical of the region) has little necessarily to do with the

strength or weakness of political power. Handy's assumption seems to have

been that because chiefs did not appear to have as much behavioural control

as was typical elsewhere, there was less inequality or stratification in the

whole system. But this was a non sequitur precisely because the Marquesan

system was different: the chief did not have the privileged ritual situation, did

not mediate between the people in general and the principal deities, and there

was therefore no basis for an encompassing, paternalistic chieftainship.

Resources were, however, unequally distributed, and the most important

asymmetrical social relations existed between prominent individuals (of both

sexes), who were often not chiefs, and their followers, who frequently

depended on a 'great' man or woman for access to land.4

To further support the thesis that power was restricted, Handy also quoted

a writer he called 'an early missionary visitor' who wrote that 'They could

hardly be said to have the rudest systems of civil government. They had a sort

of democracy of liberty, or license, without law' (J. Alexander 1895: 223, in

Handy 1923: 35-6). This writer had not in fact been to the Marquesas, but

was drawing on the accounts of earlier missionaries who had attempted to

establish a mission on Nukuhiva in 1833 and 1834 (C. Alexander 1934).

More importantly, the context and motivation of this statement are

neglected. The total failure of some evangelical missions to gain any influence

was to some extent explained away at the time by the lack of coherent

Marquesan authority; the later, popular publication produced not only a

cruder image, but one which reflected a wider discourse in which certain

Pacific societies were characterised as disordered and anarchic. Various

writers suggested that the Marquesans had 'no laws', 'no religion', 'no

marriage' and even 'no regular meals' (Troost 1829: 225; Hale 1845: 7-8;

Armstrong 1838; Ryazanov 1825: 86; Fleurieu 1801, I: 110; Shillibeer 1817:

45). It is striking that Hawaiian teachers writing about the Marquesans, and

a Scottish Presbyterian referring to Aneityum in southern Vanuatu, could

use almost the same words (from Judges 21: 25) in lamenting the

uncomfortable lack of authority: 'Every one does what is right in his own

53

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

mind' (Kekela 1854: 26, cf. J. Inglis, quoted by Spriggs 1981: 59). All these

accounts arose from situations in which islanders were unwilling to co-

operate with foreigners who were making specific attempts to alter indigenous

arrangements or practices. (Visitors in ships such as Bougainville who had no

desire to change the native system rather celebrated the apparent lack of

behavioural regulation.) In other contexts Europeans have supposed that

certain natives possessed an innate repugnance for work, without perhaps

noting that the work which was specifically unwelcome was that to be done

for foreigners on unfavourable terms. The formation of these representations

is interesting, partly because they effectively denied legitimacy to any

indigenous political order, and justified the efforts of missionaries and

colonial authorities to reorganize relations - but such depictions could

hardly be credited with any sort of accuracy. The point is a simple one of

historical method: statements must be considered in their contexts, and are

frequently revealing about the situational interests of speakers, rather than

whatever is being judged or remarked upon. In the Pacific context, this

requires a detailed analysis of what particular writers and observers were

doing in the islands. It is not enough simply to read their material, without

looking at the success or failure of their projects, and the operations their

texts performed in relation to contextualization, rationalization, legitimation

and advertisement.

Bishop Museum writers were often critical of missionary 'bias' (e.g. Buck

1945: 27-9) - which expressed a unidimensional view of the discursive

properties of these sets of representations of indigenous life - but their own

use of mission sources drew precisely on the elements of such texts which

were most circumscribed by European preoccupations. Any descriptions

belonging to a western anthropology, or to the traditions of observation

which are that discipline's precursors, must, of course, be in English or some

other European language, and will embody a western logic in various ways.

However, the extent to which this logic saturates a text and deprives it of any

depictive significance is variable. It is thus misleading to regard some

statements as 'biased' in a simple way and others as free of such taint. A

description of a particular transaction is highly likely to entail a western

model of agency, individual motivation and effect; such categories can be

scrutinized in anthropological or philosophical analysis, and it can be taken

for granted that they permeate all western representations in a more or less

complex way. There would thus be no sense in rejecting an account because

it was 'ethnocentric' in these terms, since no representation can or should

constitute itself in a conceptual vacuum. Particular forms of criticism can

single out aspects of the ideology which animates a particular text for

scrutiny, and this exercise must always be linked to intellectual interests

which have their own undiscussed tenets.5 The problem is thus not 'bias' or

ethnocentrism in general, but the fact that specific kinds of discussion in

54

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

western discourse do reveal far less about whatever is ostensibly being

described than the concerns and perceptions of the observer and writer.

General expositions of 'the native type' or 'national character' are of this

kind, and can hardly avoid a distinct and dubious imputation of pseudo-

psychological propensities and dark reflections of otherness. That is, the

divergence between the people described and some 'us' entirely distorts the

actual character of the 'others'. Handy's uncritical use of motivated

syntheses such as Alexander's book mentioned above thus courts fallacies

which a reading of more casual accounts of events might avoid.

The poorly-specified limits of chiefly power were, for Handy, aspects of a

loose or fluid social system. Despite a tendency for privileged positions to be

inherited, 'there was nothing to prevent any man or woman in the tribe from

rising to the highest positions, those of chief and inspirational priest' (1923:

36-7). In so far as it applied to tau'a, inspired priests, this statement is correct

and almost tautological, because they were shamanic figures whose power

related precisely to the fact that they were chosen by the deities, irrespective

of prior social status. Choice took place suddenly, and was manifested by

ecstatic possession and wild fits; this was, of course, arbitrary from the

viewpoint of social structure or any larger hierarchical principle.

However, all the problems of the Museum's method of ahistorical

distillation are crystallised in this assertion about chiefs, which neglects the

great impact of contact and many sorts of violence in the course of the

nineteenth century (see Dening 1980). Handy was aware, of course, that the

positions of chiefs had been dramatically eroded; it is unlikely that anyone

used or attached any weight to the chiefly title at the time of his fieldwork.

The problem is rather that he must have assumed that informants' statements

about the nature of the system in the past referred to a period before

chieftainship declined, rather than some later date (just as Radcliffe-Brown

assumed that the statements of Andamanese informants about the past

related to the period before the 1858 occupation). But the nature of chiefly

power began to change very soon after the early contacts with European

voyagers in the late eighteenth century, and the institution seems to have

been dramatically weakened after 1842, when the French annexation of the

group led to conflict at Vaitahu and Taiohae, where garrisons were stationed,

and where rebellions of sorts were put down. Although this was certainly an

irregular process, which did not affect other areas until later, there is a

striking contrast between the vigorous rivalry and expansionism of chiefs in

the 1 830s, and the weakness of their successors.6

But the principal memories of even the parents of Handy's informants

would relate to a later period, such as from the 1860s on, when local groups

seem to have been acutely fractured and traditional leaders at least half

displaced by Catholic priests, gendarmes and other officials, and settlers. In

so far as it persisted, chieftainship was shaped by intervention: influential

55

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

Europeans sometimes decided who should be chief, and there are a number

of reports of people of servile status assuming the office, which seems to have

been unheard of earlier.

The informants' statements upon which Handy's claim was based are

highly likely to relate to late cases such as these. There is no reason why

informants should have distinguished the situation between 1860 and 1890

from the period sixty to one hundred years earlier; given that there had been

a continuous process of change, and that a society free of foreigners really

was in the remote past, it is unlikely that there was any indigenous

periodization of nineteenth-century history which particular circumstances

or changes might have been linked to.7 Elsewhere Handy speaks of a 'great

war' on Fatuiva as though it belonged in some distant, pre-European past

(1923: 30), but it is quite clear from the events mentioned that the conflict

was one witnessed and documented by Hawaiian teachers from 1856 on.

Because the notion of the 'native culture' excludes post-contact events, that

is the indigenous history which is also a European history, there is somehow

no space between the past time of the living 'native culture' and the time of

professional observation. There is, of course, a temporal gap, but what has

taken place in that is either subtraction or addition. Things like myths and

rituals have been forgotten, and western clothes or ideas may be adopted, but

there has been no creative reworking or dynamic accommodation. If there is

a memory at all it must, therefore, pertain to the 'native culture'. But it is all

too apparent that some of these 'traditional memories' either relate to events

of the colonial period or reflect some positive rendering of the past consistent

with the difficult and tragic circumstances of that period.8

Early Marquesan society: an alternate view

The errors here arise from a failure to recognize the extent to which

Marquesan society had in fact departed from a Polynesian pattern of

hierarchical solidarity in which chieftainship encompassed society and was

central to it. Marquesan chiefs had no ritual centrality with respect to

prosperity and production and likewise no generalized titular ownership of

land. The readers of documents encounter a series of general statements

which suggest that there was no higher-level chiefly ownership which might

have been reflected in tribute or prestations as Handy suggested, and

moreover that there were autonomous landholders who held their own tracts

quite independently. The relationship Handy described, in which services

and a portion of the product were exchanged for rights to use land, certainly

existed, but between landholders - including chiefs - and their dependants,

rather than between chiefs and others allotted land by chiefs.9 He mistook

references to such relations between chiefs and people for the overall form of

the system, and completely overlooked the non-chiefly landowners, whose

56

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

position might be compared to that of Tahitian ra'atira, if William Ellis's

account of the situation of that class was correct: they 'held their land, not

from the gift of the King, but from their ancestors' (1829, II: 343-4). It is,

however, only the range of evidence about particular relations and the events

through which they were worked out which enables one to make a sensible

choice between general descriptive propositions of this kind, and to see

beyond them to a sense of the system in practice.

Marquesan economic inequalities were incorporated into but not

generated by a caste-like hierarchy of tapu grades. The overall opposition

was between male and female and was crucially worked out through rules

that women could not eat with men in their tapu eating houses, or eat food

destined for men, while men could partake of food belonging to women if

they wished (although there were many more specific restrictions applying to

certain foods and times). This gender opposition was cut across by rank

differences among both women and men; some high grades amounted to elite

clubs, while others connected with particular occupations were sometimes

more broadly based. Tapu and me'ie (free of tapu) were contextual,

depending on the status of the other party at a particular time. Grades were

usually distinguished by particular facial tattoos and usually by a special

eating house. The hierarchy readily incorporated groups with claims to status

but lacking a place in the genealogical hierarchy: thus there seems to have

been warrior grades, and a grade composed of people distinguished by their

property, but otherwise common (Crook 1800: 118). This unitary hierarchy

ordered by basic oppositions was a distinctive Marquesan development. It

seems to have broken down early in the nineteenth century - apparently

existing only in a reduced form even in the 1830s - and escaped Handy's

attention altogether.

While Marquesan chiefs were prominent and powerful figures, they were

not really central to Marquesan social life: a distinct, complicated hierarchy,

not connected with the chiefly line, had developed. Chieftainship was

disconnected from shamanism, which controlled the fundamental, life-giving

ritual capacities, as well as from any larger encompassing field of

asymmetrical relations connected with the control of key resources: the

privileged positions had become generalized among landholders.

The simple notion in Handy's account that the chief was like a father to

the whole tribe is certainly wide of the mark. At the same time, he fails to

recognize various distinct aspects of hierarchy, and diminishes the overall

degree of inequality. The situation of apparent flexibility is curiously equated

with relative equality - presumably manifesting the liberal and primarily

American notion of equality as competitive equality of opportunity. Handy

in fact notes that while early writers from monarchical Europe tended to see

kings in mere chiefs, visitors from the United States such as the missionary

C. S. Stewart and Captain David Porter had a clearer vision: the former even

57

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

referred to the Marquesas as a 'republic en sauvage'. In suggesting that these

authors recognized the fundamentally egalitarian character of Marquesan

society because they came from republican America, Handy posits an

identity between the sorts of egalitarianism which exist in the two places. If

these were instead fundamentally different, the Americans would not have

been better equipped to perceive the society. It would be uncharitable to

suggest that Handy took this equation too seriously, but in the context of his

discussion it does imply a more general conflation of ascribed rank and

inequality on one side, and competition and equality on the other (cf. Jolly

1987). This notion is objectionable because it reflects an uncritical adoption

and projection of the values of capitalism, but also happens to be totally

misleading in so far as it is applied to Polynesian societies. Marquesan

property relations were fluid, and were not defined by any caste-like system

of ascribed rank, but were certainly unequal, while various ascribed

distinctions did not generate relations of exploitation or dependency in

practice.

The point here is not simply that the deeper concepts and methods of

museum anthropology generate Handy's particular misrepresentations.

More significantly, as Handy's account becomes Goldman's raw material,

these turn to facilitate a particular evolutionary understanding.

The initial fault is that Marquesan society is placed on a sort of scale from

less authoritarian (or politically hierarchical, or centralized) to more so (or

more stratified). I lump a set of distinct terms together to underline the

vagueness which a unilineal view of political development imposes. A variety

of distinct circumstances, political capacities, social relations, and behaviours

are compressed onto one axis. The ability of a leader to use violence thus

becomes a sign of the same thing as, say, the control over land or ritual

privilege. Less of whatever this is means that we witness primitive

communism or primitive democracy; more of these signs of power mean a

kind of feudalism or 'rigidity'. This coalescence of an array of asymmetries

and images has not, unfortunately, been expunged from modern anthro-

pology, which is supposedly very careful in refraining from imposing

inappropriate western categories upon other cultures: Lederman (1986), for

instance, sees the Mendi as living in a sort of small-scale democracy.

Because Marquesan society obviously lacked some of the criteria of a more

unequal or centralized system, it has effectively been located on the

egalitarian end of this compelling spectrum. The central metaphor is one of

individual flexibility or fluidity, as opposed to regulation and authority.

Certain observations of apparent anarchy are thus seized upon, and

translated into the 'fluidity' of the Marquesan system; between The native

culture and Ancient Polynesian society the divergence of Marquesan society

from something more typically Polynesian is reduced to movement from

relative rigidity to fluidity. Despite this shift the chief is seen to maintain

58

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

centrality and allot land in the more stratified Marquesan societies. There is

thus some sort of loosening-up, but no actual structural transformation.

Structural transformations are in fact invisible unless they map onto the

unilineal path from more to less stratified. The ambiguous position of

Marquesan society - looser yet still centralized - is crucial because the

Marquesas seem to be on Goldman's path from 'open' to 'stratified'; this

particular instance makes the movement from one form to the other

plausible. The 'example', the 'data', which appear to be quite independent

of Goldman's theorizing, are thus already fashioned in quite a particular

way; the case is already situated in relation to the more stratified Polynesian

societies, and although Handy had no particular evolutionary bent, his

unidimensional view of power and hierarchy was consistent with the paths of

social development which Goldman proceeded to map out. 'Paths' is

perhaps the wrong word, since the exercise was directed not at a plurality of

meandering routes, expressing the diverse purposes of people who, say, used

a forest, but sought instead to define a necessary road which climbed from

one condition to the next. An image less easy to reconcile with the diverse

social projects of real people, or the complicated histories of real groups,

which follow contours as often as they go up or down. In any case, the

evidence can be perceived differently, and if the transformation and singular

erosion of Marquesan chieftainship is recognized, this society's significance

in a larger historical scheme becomes much more problematic.

From distinction to transgression: the evolution of 'open' societies

I have suggested that Marquesan society was misrepresented in both

Goldman's sources and in his interpretation. Some anthropologists ignore

longer-term change, or argue that an evolutionary framework should be

totally rejected. So far as Pacific societies are concerned, I suggest that an

understanding of longer-term history is crucial. A comparative discussion of

east Polynesian societies can perhaps illustrate some of the social

transformations which took place in the region. These cases show that

specific ethnographic features can be analysed in various ways, but not

actually explained, without reference to a longer pattern of change and

development. A view of eastern Pacific social 'evolution' is developed which

is very different to that of Goldman, yet insists on the importance of the

contextualization of local relations in the histories which differentiated one

locality from another.

On Easter Island, now known as Rapanui among its inhabitants, the 'king'

or high chief (ariki mau), who came from the Miru clan, was said to be sacred

and possess great prestige. Like Marquesan chiefs he was surrounded by tapu

which extended to his personal property and food. His head was so sacred

59

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

that his hair could never be cut, and any article he used subsequently became

tapu (Metraux 1940).

A chant recorded by M6traux makes it clear that the notional basis of this

status was the influence of the ariki mau over nature:

What does the king make fertile in the country?

The yams, the taro, the sweet potatoes the king makes grow in

the country.

Now he makes the yams, the sweet potatoes, the sugar cane, the

shoots favourable in the country, in the shade.

What does the king make fertile in the country?

The turtle, its abdominal shell, its legs - these he makes grow in

the country.

(Metraux 1940: 133-4)

The formula is repeated in relation to various fish, ferns, plants, natural

elements, and so forth. For one of Metraux's informants, the relationship

between the ariki mau and fertility was illustrated by the fact that the hua tea,

the 'favourite variety of sweet potato' was 'no longer found on Easter Island

for it could not exist without the king who made it grow' (ibid). As one

would expect, the paramount received certain first fruits and had some

control over production: he could restrict or initiate harvesting, for instance.

However, the general impressions of the more reliable observers suggested

that the authority of the ariki mau was extremely limited, although there is

very little information about the projects of different people, about successes

and failures, which would enable us to see how claims of authority and

relations of asymmetry and dependence were worked out in practice.

It is clear that beside the relationships between chiefs and people, another

set of activities developed, which seem to have been a focus of society's

attention, and which produced another sort of leader, the tangata manu or

bird man. The cult revolved around a competition each year among some

members of the Matatoa - the warrior clan 'in the ascendancy at any given

time' (Routledge 1917: 339). Only those members of that clan who had been

dreamt about by a shaman could compete. The competitors were usually

prominent men of the clan; with various servants and many others they went

up to the cult centre of Orongo, at the corner of the island near the rocky

islets of Motunui and Motuiti, where each year the migratory sooty tern

(manu tara) arrived to nest. Each competitor nominated a hopu or servant

who actually participated in the race upon his behalf. The hopu went to the

island and lived among the rocks, while the others lived in stone houses at

Orongo, dancing every day. This race time was said to be one of 'intense

excitement' (Thomson 1889: 483; cf. Routledge 1917: 340 nl). The first

servant to secure an egg after the arrival of the birds tied it to his head in a

basket and swam back to the island. According to Routledge 'the gods

intervened in the hunt, so that the man who was not destined to win went

right past the egg' (1917: 345). The new tangata manu shaved his head and

60

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

painted it red, which was a tapu colour in many parts of Polynesia. The bird

man was then secluded for five months, and was brought offerings of food

which Routledge saw as' the sole political advantages of victory' (1917: 348).

The fact of seclusion certainly must have restricted the bird man's power to

interfere in matters.

More significantly, the cult marks an overall shift towards warriors. Years

were given the names of bird men: Routledge reported that 'the request to

be given the names of as many bird years as possible met with an almost

embarrassing response, eighty six being quoted straight away' and that there

was a' curious contrast' between this aspect of memory and' the impossibility

experienced in obtaining any satisfactory list of the "ariki" or chiefs' (1917:

352 & n). The construction of a time scale on the basis of eponymous archons

or rulers' reigns says something about the stamp of a great person upon

affairs - or at least about the construction of events at the time or

retrospectively. In some sense bird men were more prominent than chiefs,

even if not exactly central to society: the fact that numerous observers

mistook the bird man competition for an election to the chiefship, or spoke

of bird men as chiefs, testifies to the extent to which the chiefs proper were

marginalized (e.g. Ollivier 1867: 255-6; Palmer 1870: 173). The fact that they

were presented with the first sugar cane suggests a partial appropriation of

the high chiefs right to first fruits, although there was no basis in warrior

activity for influence over nature.

With respect to practical influence, Roussel suggested that the king's

'authority was nil and entirely disregarded. It has passed entirely into the

hands of the mata-toa who decided everything and carried on the war

without beforehand consulting his majesty' (quoted in Metraux 1940: 135;

cf. Thomson 1889: 472). There are many statements of this kind, virtually all

of which are based on observation after 1862, when Peruvian slaving vessels

kidnapped about 2,000 islanders to work on guano mines, including the then

paramount chief (Maude 1982). Although a younger son survived to inherit

the title, the catastrophe (compounded by epidemics) had a shattering and

irreversible effect: even the bird man ceremonies were discontinued a few

years later. It is thus very difficult to determine what kings and bird men did,

and specifically how their forms of influence interacted in practice. The shape

of leadership is perhaps less significant than the broader and deeper drift

which the bird cult represented; there is no doubt that before the crisis this

was a focus for popular excitement, entailing much organization and

ceremony which the king had nothing to do with (Routledge, Ethnology, I:

101).

The ritual basis for chiefly encompassment thus seems to have co-existed

with a dramatic erosion of the chieftainship. The archaeology of Rapanui

makes this discrepancy understandable.

The island was probably first settled about AD 400 or 500. At that time

61

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

Rapanui was probably covered by an open dryland forest. There is relatively

little information about prehistoric subsistence, but it is likely that, as in

other parts of Polynesia, there was a diverse base incorporating animal

husbandry, fishing, shell-fish collecting, and the cultivation of sugar cane,

sweet potatoes, taro and bananas. The remarkable physical isolation and

small size of Rapanui, however, meant that certain resources, such as wild

seabirds, fish and shell-fish, were less abundant than elsewhere in Polynesia.

There is a west to east continuum across the Pacific from floral and faunal

abundance and diversity to impoverishment, and Easter Island was certainly

at one extreme. The absence of a fringing coral reef meant in any case that

marine resources were limited. Dogs and pigs were not introduced by

Polynesian settlers or became rapidly extinct, no remains having been

archaeologically recovered. The only introduced domestic animal was

therefore the chicken which assumed an importance in subsistence and

exchange it lacked elsewhere in Polynesia (McCoy 1979: 140; Flenley 1979;

Kirch 1984: 264-78).

Despite these restricted resources a substantial population of perhaps

7,000 developed before AD 1000. There seem to have been relatively stable

settlements of local descent groups which, from an early date, began to

construct ceremonial centres, the most prominent elements of which were the

famous statues. The especially impressive character of these figures has

obscured the fact that they reflect a local development of east Polynesian

marae (ritual centres), which were usually oriented towards a platform with

some upright stones at one end. It is clear that the moai statues, like their less-

striking counterparts in other structures, represented deified lineage

ancestors, and that the ceremonies which took place on these sites related

mainly to the distinction, celebration and commemoration of chiefly people

and chieftainship. This was made apparent to members of Cook's second

expedition, who visited Easter Island in March, 1774: 'they were erected to

the memory of their chiefs; for they all had different Names and they always

called them Areekes' (i.e. ariki) (Cook [1961]: 345; cf. Forster [1982], III:

469). Elsewhere in Polynesia the most important ceremonies which took

place at marae were the installations of chiefs and paramounts, and rites for

various stages in the lives of chiefly children (e.g. for Tahiti see Henry 1928:

157-96 passim). A chant concerning Tahitian marae concluded:

It was the basis of royalty

It awakened the gods

It fixed the 'uru girdle of sovereigns (ibid: 151)1°

On Rapanui much of the work of local descent groups in the earlier and

middle periods of prehistory must have been dedicated to the construction of

the temple precincts and statues. In their production, as well as in their

subsequent ritual use, these most prominent structures directly reflected a

society which revolved around, and was encompassed by, chieftainship.

62

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

This stable hierarchical order seems to have fallen apart as a consequence

of overpopulation and landscape degradation. The burning of vegetation,

perhaps associated with swidden cultivation, made erosion possible and, in

the longer term forest regeneration impossible. Given the irregular but

torrential pattern of rainfall in eastern Polynesia, this may have happened

very quickly. The areas which would have supported cultivation were

reduced, and the grassland formations which developed in place of earlier

vegetation regimes were probably conducive to further erosion. Pollen

studies have established that various trees which grew on the island in the

past became extinct: there was certainly once a denser vegetation cover

(McCoy 1979: 141). There was thus a serious contraction of the resource

base, which was aggravated by the fact that the shortage of timber made it

impossible to build large canoes, and thus restricted deep-sea fishing. Early

visitors frequently noted the scarcity, smallness and 'very mean' character of

the canoes (e.g. Roggeveen 1722 [1908]: 19; Cook [1961]: 352). The shortage

of wood was evidently so acute that the islanders sometimes attempted to

obtain it through barter with Europeans, which took place nowhere else in

Polynesia (Dupetit-Thouars 1840-43, II: 227). A further difficulty arose from

the absence of permanent streams, which precluded the intensification of

agriculture through irrigation.

Given that Rapanui's resources were not, in any case, especially diverse or

abundant, the deterioration of the environment must have produced

widespread hunger and hardship. In particular cases this would have led to

the rejection of individual chiefs but also evidently brought about the decline

of chieftainship as such. Although the idiom of chiefly encompassment

persisted in such forms as the chant quoted, and in the behavioural

manifestations of tapu, these meanings must have been empty, given the

failure of the chief to deliver the goods. The decline of the ariki was

associated with the rise of the warriors, and an unstable and predatory

system developed, in which warrior groups dispossessed others, and intense

competition over declining resources developed. The change seems to have

taken place about AD 1500 and is manifested archaeologically in thousands

of obsidian spear points, and in the development of fortified dwellings in

caves, noted by La Prouse amongst others (1797, II: 86). Most statues were

overthrown in this period; although the symbols of chiefly lines seem mainly

to have been destroyed by enemy groups, the attack reflects broader

rejection, since marae elsewhere in Polynesia were never desecrated in

warfare (except in the context of the introduction of Christianity). This

process seems still to have been going on in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, since some statues appear to have been knocked down

between the visits of Cook (1774) and Kotzebue (1816) (Beechey 1831, I: 55).

While many recent speculative writers have linked the statues with some

foreign influence (such as an invasion of American Indians) most of the

voyagers recognized that they had been built by the islanders, and La

63

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

Perouse even noted that there must have been some change in the 'form of

government' because there were no longer chiefs of such stature that so many

men would occupy themselves in erecting a status to commemorate them (La

Perouse 1797, II: 86). This insight has, I think, been confirmed through

archaeological work.

The bird man cult thus reflects not so much an opening-up, or loosening

of a hierarchical order, which might ultimately have led to a new stratified

system, but rather a distinct movement to a predatory warrior regime -

which arose at the expense of the ancestral chiefly structure."

Something like the social breakdown caused by hunger and overpopulation

on Rapanui was witnessed by some early visitors to the Marquesas. Famine

occured periodically: in the 1870s or 1880s, the missionary ethnographer

Chaulet was told about six major events, which had names like 'suck bones'

and 'withered fruit' (AMS: 22). The main cause of these crises was drought,

which severely affected the staple, breadfruit, but the natural unreliability of

precipitation was very much compounded by such social practices as the

destruction (through ringbarking and similar means) of enemies' trees in war.

Between 1800 and 1803 hundreds of people died in some parts of

Nukuhiva; whole valleys were said to be depopulated on 'Ua Pou. Many

found the hazards of a canoe voyage more attractive than remaining on their

island, and went to look for other islands dreamt about by their shamans 'a

few days sailing distant' 'where plenty of food is abounding' (Robarts

[1974]: 119). Although some people of property might have had food in

reserve, reciprocity and distribution broke down. It was said that stronger

preyed upon weaker, but since the absence of cannibalism motivated by

hunger was asserted, and since no cases were ever documented, such talk was

more likely an expression of the social disintegration produced by famine,

rather than a description of events. Chaulet implies that two anti-social

practices, cannibalism and incest - both signified by the word kaikaia - were

conceptually compounded: 'they say that parents even eat their children'

(AMS: 22).

Given these periodic crises, it might be expected that something similar to

the rejection of chiefs on Rapanui would have transpired in the Marquesas.

This is in fact so, although to a more limited extent. Chiefs were disconnected

from the overall control of land, but did remain prominent and significant

people, despite a dispersal of powers.

The distinctive feature of the Marquesan divergence from the hypothetical

ancestral Polynesian pattern was that chiefs had lost control over the 'work

of the gods'. There is no evidence that they were ever presented with first-

fruits, nor that they ever performed any ceremonies connected with fertility.

However, some tau'a (shamans) were thought to have 'power over the

elements and seasons' and, more particularly, were 'firmly believed to

dispense fertility to their Bread Fruit Trees' (Crook, Account: 137-8). It was

64

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

they, therefore, who generally received gifts of food, and were recognized

over whole islands, while chiefly authority was generally restricted to valley

groups or often groups within valleys.12

Patterns in eastern Polynesian history

The Marquesan and Rapanui cases suggest a more general pattern of

contrasts between such societies and those dominated by an encompassing

chiefship or kingship. These can be represented as a pattern of transformation

if it is supposed that the ancestral Polynesian system entailed an

encompassing chiefly unity. Such an assumption could be justified on the

basis of the very widespread distribution of first-fruits offerings, which

directly manifest society's indebtedness to the chief who is virtually the giver

of life and the cause of growth.

First, there is a general shift from the prominence of chiefs to the

prominence of warriors. Secondly, the chief tends to become less of an

orderly ruler and receiver of offerings, and more of a usurper or conqueror.

This possibility is a variant on the first, and suggests that warrior activities

are assimilated to the chiefship, whereas in the first case chiefs are more

generally displaced by warriors. The Marquesas and Rapanui respectively

reflect these divergent tendencies. The latter reflects a more extreme political

rupture while the former seems less significant in itself. The third

transformation is from a situation in which chiefs are ritual masters par

excellence, and are the agents behind production and prosperity, to one in

which shamans have moved out from the relatively restricted sphere of

healing, have acquired the capacity to control the weather and crops, and

have become much more significant in general. They also tend to displace

'official' priests (who are essentially the agents or servants of chiefs), and

occupy the marae, the crucial sites of ritual activity. In the Marquesas (as

well as on the island of Niue), chiefly displacement was more pronounced at

this ritual level, and both shamanism in general, and a few individual

shamans, became highly consequential.13

These shifts could be seen as 'devolutionary' in the sense that a centralized

structure is diminished, but do not necessarily entail a diminution of

inequality or stratification. It is quite implausible to represent these societies,

as Goldman does, on a continuum between the more egalitarian 'traditional'

and the 'stratified' systems. The central structure of chieftainship was clearly

fractured in a radical way which would not permit more regionally-inclusive

chiefdom-confederations or petty kingdoms to emerge. Societies such as the

Marquesas represent a divergent step, which is more like to have been away

from 'stratified' systems than towards them. If 'evolution' is seen as

directional change, and 'devolution' its undoing, it is thus virtually

impossible to understand these cases. The specific features of their histories,

65

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

of the changes which have been described, are obliterated by any model

which imposes unilineal progressions.

Theoretical implications

The intermediate location of 'open' societies in Goldman's evolutionary

sequence is plausible in his account because specific cases are misrepresented.

In the Marquesas it is suggested that anyone could become a chief, and that

chiefs did not have a great deal of authority anyway, but the disabling of

chiefs in relation to vital rituals and property relations is not recognized.

Thus the difference between a chief in this 'open' system and his counterpart

in a 'stratified' society has the appearance of a quantitative difference: one

has less power and the other rather more. It is easy to envisage that the

former might somehow acquire more and end up resembling the latter. If

attention is shifted away from this quantitative metaphor toward the special

kinds of agency and capacities that certain privileged individuals have, it is

obvious that difference is qualitative. The fact that the shamans take over a

crucial capacity for vital ritual action cannot be incorporated into a model of

evolution which is about increasing (or decreasing) stratification, but is

central to one of the dominant patterns of political transformations in

eastern Polynesia.

The difference between this overall interpretation and that of Ancient

Polynesian society partly derives from theory, since in Goldman's work, as

well as in evolutionary thought in general, evolution is closely identified with

progressive movement towards increasing hierarchy and complexity. Al-

though there is no explicit claim that this must be the case, the possibility of

'devolution' is neglected; moreover it seems that all change takes place along

the continuum entailing increasing inequality, regional, integration, and so

forth; there is no space for divergent transformation which lacks a positive

or negative evolutionary value.

The reappraisal of what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rapanui

society represented was dependent on archaeological evidence. The use of

this material - although truncated and illustrative in this case - amounts to

something other than simply drawing on another body of relevant evidence,

because it becomes possible to deal with longer-term change as a located

historical process, rather than as an abstract difference between compared

societies. The archaeological information is, of course, generally problematic

and sketchy, and does not provide the basis of a fine-grained picture of the

kind one might derive from historical or ethnographic materials. But there is

a categorical distinction between a logic which uses a temporal metaphor to

make a short cut through a tangle of differences between two societies which

exist at the same time, and an argument which specifies the longer-term

transformation of the one society. This society may be transformationally

66

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

connected with others, but ancestry and divergence are specified in prehistory

instead of abstractly imputed. The force of evolutionary argument should be

its capacity to generate accounts of patterns of longer-term change. The

construction of processes in prehistoric and historic sequences need not

abandon this generalizing orientation, but can concretize and specify cases

which are no longer subordinated to a logic of stages, ladders, or roads.

Differences between possible perspectives arise also from the form of

evidence. Handy's propositions were derived from general impressions and

accounts. An alternative description of Marquesan society can be based to a

considerable extent on particular situations and events: an analysis, for

example, of circumstances and disputes in the valley of Taiohae (on

Nukuhiva) at the beginning of the nineteenth century generated a description

of social relations around land which differed in crucial respects from the

image derived from less particular accounts. Perhaps most interpretations

seem to be based on a mixture of definite circumstances and generalities, but

I will suggest later that 'events' in anthropological descriptions are not

always as particular as they seem. In any case, the issue arises of the extent

to which the distinct forms of apparently raw material give rise to a

systematic divergence in interpretations.

There is a tendency for any general statement about society or culture

(such as a 'rule' of behaviour) to be saturated by the particular colour of

informants' or observers' constructions. Since generalized images of

(collective) selves and others are important, such constructs must be attended

to. But they do not necessarily reflect either more specific representations in

social practice or social and political dynamics. On the other hand, images

of events and particular circumstances speak more directly to an under-

standing of practices and patterns of change. The opposition here is not, of

course, between ideology and actuality, or between internal, culture-bound

models and scientific description. Deep-seated notions of various kinds

animate all descriptions, whether they are enunciated by or elicited from tribal

people, fabricated in the heat of a moment or with scientific detachment by

intruders, and whether they allude to moments or propensities. I am not

asserting that accounts of events and notions can be construed as transparent

and opaque respectively, but the permeation and constitution of depiction is

an uneven process which therefore permits different conclusions to be drawn

from different kinds of descriptions, precludes others sometimes and perhaps

some all the time. Some accounts can be read against the grain and turned

perversely to an analyst's purpose, while others cannot, or smuggle

peculiarities of their projection into the analysis. The circumstances in which

cultural structures are manifested and played out in action can be drawn into

a discussion of cultural and social dynamics, but the notions and metaphors

of the structure itself often cannot. Ideas do not usually offer a commentary

upon their own formation. Anthropologists must therefore attend to events

67

Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

and practices, as well as representations. Some of the dominant images in the

Easter Island and Marquesan cases did not differ substantially from those of

other Polynesian societies. Only the examination of social relations, and of

the salience of images in practice, could reveal the remarkable and distinctive

characteristics of lives on those islands.

68

6

Travellers philosophical and

unphilosophical

... several learned and ingenious works on the human species have appeared in the

present age, written by philosophers, whose names alone should seem to be sufficient

recommendation. I have, however, early observed, that, being misled by the vague

reports of unphilosophical travellers, which they have sometimes wilfully changed

and moulded, to suit their own opinions; their systems, though ever so ingenious, are

seldom agreeable to nature. It appears indeed to be the general fault of these writers,

to study mankind only in their cabinets; or, at best, to observe no other than highly

civilized nations...

Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations made on a voyage round the world (1778)

These criticisms are reminiscent of the repudiation in early twentieth-century

ethnography of speculative 'armchair' anthropology. The anthropology

which was confined to book cabinets was not, of course, opposed by a whole

professional school of more grounded studies, but a great deal of writing of

various sorts was drawn more directly from experience among 'savages'.

Much of my criticism thus far has in fact played upon a matching of

twentieth-century ethnographies of 'traditional' societies against a knowl-

edge which draws on allusions and descriptions in a curious array of earlier

publications and documents. One of the arguments of this essay is that it is

vital to know things that can only be known through such fragments and

constructions, and that it is vital to link such sources with later, apparently

more rounded professional ethnographies. This assertion might seem to be

unproblematic, but runs against a deeply-held anthropological view that

older authorities, and especially missionary accounts, are of limited and

dubious value, being at best unsystematic and at worst deeply prejudiced.'

Antipathies between anthropologists and missionaries in the field have

various grounds, such as an apparent conflict of interest: missionaries are

thought to be eradicating the traditions and pagan rituals which anthro-

pologists want to study. Mission practice has been, by definition,

interventionist, and has often invited criticism for various reasons. But the

methodological exclusion of certain kinds of information has a different basis

in the larger configuration of anthropological discourse. A central feature of

the discipline's practice has been and is fieldwork carried out by a trained

investigator. Whether this is regarded as a rigorous process, or, as in Geertz's

more honest account, as a tentative matter of 'finding one's feet' (chapter 2),

69

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

the form of learning is represented as the only significant source of

anthropological knowledge. The implication in Geertz's account was that

neither those who experienced a situation without an ethnographer's

inquisitive orientation, nor those who reflected upon social circumstances

without such experience, could arrive at any distinctively anthropological

understanding. The perception is thus that analysis and interpretation are

directly derived from a method, or rather, a celebrated activity which is

constitutive of 'the anthropologist' as a person and a practitioner. The

difficulty, though, is that some kinds of crucial information about particular

cultures cannot be obtained through fieldwork; nor can they be obtained by

dipping into a few historical sources in a way which is entirely marginal to

a fieldwork project. An adequate historical account frequently depends upon

much rigorous and extensive research, yet serious historical research is

devalued in two ways: as a practice, it is not embedded in the interpretive

effort to translate culture, and lacks the experiential character of fieldwork

(which may be privileged from a variety of positivist, materialist and

interpretive perspectives); secondly, it draws upon accounts which are taken

to be flawed, partial, ideologically-tainted and generally inadequate to the

construction of professional ethnography. Since the 'methodological' issue

of the status of various kinds of early sources is directly connected with the

'theoretical' issue of whether a historical anthropology is desirable or

practical, the basis of this generalized exclusion must be examined.

The characteristics of missionary ethnography

Malinowski dismissed the missionary contribution, which he claimed was

exemplified by such gross misstatement as the following: 'We teach lawless

men to become obedient, inhuman men to love, and savage men to change'

(C. W. Abel, in Malinowski 1922: IOn). His criticism was specifically that the

notion that the savage was governed merely by instincts or 'unchecked

passions' failed to recognize the 'strict code of behaviour and good manners'

which in fact prevailed. While it could not be disputed that certain

missionaries were entirely obtuse, it is most unlikely that any actually

thought that there was no regulation of conduct in primitive societies. Such

extravagant claims, where made, are frequently found to be undermined by

material in the same missionary text. But Malinowski quotes from evangelical

propaganda as though it represented and expressed missionary under-

standing. He does not even mention that the book he quotes, Savage life in

New Guinea, was aimed at children. (The first sentences of the main text are:

' British boys and girls! I want to introduce you to my friend, the strange wild

inhabitant of New Guinea' [Abel 1902: 11].) It would be remarkable if works

of this kind, which were produced mainly to stimulate fund-raising, exhibited

anything like scholarly detachment. The fact that the sentence Malinowski

70

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

quoted was in the 'before and after' form, expressing the transformation

from savage to Christian, exposes the central polemical intent. The striking

contrasts which were meant to be apparent to readers of the missionary

literature from the fields in which the Gospel had already taken hold were a

promise that funds expended in extending the endeavour would certainly

bring forth results (the agricultural metaphor was frequently employed in

this context). To treat this literature, often edited and worked up by

metropolitan writers, as a serious reflection of the knowledge of missionaries

in the field, is like equating the claims of election manifestos with the analyses

of party researchers. However, even in such works much of the description

is far closer to conventional anthropological writing than writers such as

Malinowski would permit one to expect. One section introduces in a

straightforward if elementary way the differences between 'Papuan' and

more familiar families:

A partition about three feet high divides the house in two; the front portion being

reserved for the male members of the family, and the back - which is smaller - being

at the disposal of the women. A house is never occupied only by a man and his wife

and family. Aunts, uncles, and cousins of many removes are included in the family

circle. Relationships are not so simple as they are with us. On the wife's side especially

the ties are very close. For instance, if you were a New Guinea boy, or girl, your

mother's brother would rank as your father, and her sister as your mother; your first

cousins on your mother's side would actually be your brothers and sisters, and so on.

So that if you enquire of a New Guinea householder how his family is made up, you

find it includes relations having strong claims upon him, though they are only

distantly connected from our benighted way of thinking. (Abel 1902: 28-9)

Malinowski failed to acknowledge that a certain ethnographic curiosity

lay behind the writings of missionaries. This was loosely linked with mission

objectives, and it is occasionally explicitly stated that native systems should

be understood in order that they might be changed or subverted, but this was

as much a way of legitimizing the interest as a real indication of connections

which were in fact generally tenuous. It is sometimes clear that the writers

saw themselves having a thirst for knowledge which was detached from any

instrumental purpose. In the Preface to the second edition of his synthesis,

Polynesian researches, William Ellis noted that various early reports had

'excited a strong desire to obtain additional information' relating to various

subjects such as 'the nature of [the Polynesians'] ancient institutions' (1831,

I: xix). Since great changes were taking place, principally consequent on the

adoption of Christianity, knowledge of former ways and circumstances was

thought to be fading.

The present, therefore, seems to be the only time in which a variety of facts, connected

with the former state of the Inhabitants, can be secured; and to furnish, as far as

possible, an authentic record of these, and thus preserve them from oblivion, is one

design which the Author has always kept in view. (ibid: xix-xx; cf. Gill 1894: 8-9)

71

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

Ellis noted further that the relative simplicity of Polynesian society afforded

particular 'facilities' for observing the 'essential characteristics' and

'tendencies' of idolatry 'which could not be obtained in a more advanced

state of society' (ibid). This particular description was thus intended to serve

a more general knowledge of heathen societies.2 To some extent, a model for

investigation, the use of informants, and data collection developed through

language work, because, in many cases, competence in previously unrecorded

languages was absolutely essential for effective mission work.3 In some

instances, missionaries' diaries make it clear that obtaining lists of words led

them to other topics such as names of deities, and to other activities such as

compiling censuses (e.g. Darling 1834-35).

Accurate reportage was regarded as a virtue and it is clear that some

missionary descriptions of particular beliefs or customs were the products of

specific inquiries rather than observation which was incidental to missionary

activity. This gave rise to numerous works of relatively extensive and precise

description, some of which contained very little in the way of mission

propaganda. The criteria which legitimate such writings as pieces of adequate

description are sometimes foregrounded: a 'correct and reliable' account of

'manners and customs, occupations and surroundings [and] modes of

thought' among other things, will consist of knowledge gathered in a

particular way, as James Gilmour notes in his Preface to Among the Mongols:

[The book] is not a missionary's report nor a traveller's diary, nor a student's

compilation, but has for its source things seen, heard and experienced by me while

travelling with natives in the desert, sharing with them the hospitality of the wayside

tent, taking my turn in the night-watch against thieves, resting in the comparative

comfort of the portable cloth travelling tent, or dwelling as a lodger in their more

permanent abodes of trellis-work and felt while engaged first of all in learning the

language and acquainting myself with the country, and afterwards in the prosecution

of my missionary duties.

(1883: 5-6)

Gilmour proceeds to indicate from which area his knowledge derives, and

reiterates that the combination of linguistic competence and careful

observation is the basis of a secure description. This is, of course, highly

reminiscent of Malinowski's later insistence upon the importance of the

ethnographer's intimate contact with the native people (with the implications

of friendship and shared hardship), but reflects a far more general device of

authentication and justification in descriptive works about foreign parts or

peoples: it is crucial that the author's singular qualifications be initially

specified, since these provide the basis for belief in the account. These are

sometimes even expressed in titles such as Seventeen years among the Dayaks

or Travels in Africa, which sometimes distinguished a work of personal

observation from one of secondary compilation. The distinctive feature of

this mechanism in Gilmour's and Malinowski's books is that the special

character of the knowledge is defined by a series of exclusions: the work is

72

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

not merely based on personal observation, but draws rather on a depth of

familiarity beyond that which casual travellers could conceivably acquire.

This is signalled in Malinowski by the break with the company of other white

men and in Gilmour by the variety of everyday Mongol experience he has

shared. The tendency in contemporary anthropology has been to lengthen

the introductory sections which convey the personal side of fieldwork; this

amounts to an unrestrained elaboration of the more general literary

construct and makes an uncompromising assertion of validity in the guise of

a more innocent sketch of the circumstances of work.4

There is a more specific supposition that missionary descriptions are

worthless in so far as they deal with religious matters because of the specific

antipathy of the writers to non-Christian religious beliefs. In fact, there are

some cases where the experience of missionary observers obviously led them

to believe that pagan magic was efficacious in practice (e.g. Marzan 1908).

Europeans other than missionaries were frequently convinced that sorcery

worked: Edward Robarts concluded a description with the words 'this I have

seen and know to be true' ([1974]: 255). He had reason to feel threatened,

because a hostile Frenchman also resident on Nukuhiva had attempted to

acquire knowledge of the rites in order to kill him. Published missionary

accounts usually make passing references to the false or objectionable

character of specific beliefs, or the 'contradictory absurdities' of the whole

system (Williams 1884: 211), but such statements cannot be regarded as

premises or structuring principles for the overall exposition. If this was the

case, the discourse would emphasize discontinuities and lack of coherence,

but the systematizing drive of western knowledge generally defeated this

impulse, with the result that descriptions of 'pagan' religious beliefs did

attempt to ground specific observances or rites in frameworks such as

ancestor worship which made them sensible in their context.5

The distinction in the corpus of missionary work between unpublished

letters and diaries and what was passed on to the public must here be

appreciated. Much soul-searching and prejudice about indigenous systems

does appear in private papers, but a great deal of ethnographic and linguistic

discussion for its own sake is also found. In published form this tended to be

directed didactically, although early periodicals often presented missionaries'

letters or journal extracts from the field in an abbreviated but relatively

unmodified form. But there is a sharper gap between such texts and later

mass-distribution publications like that quoted by Malinowski, which are

clearly composed and organized with a central didactic aim. Some notion of

rigour lay behind the preparation of such essays as the 1800 'Account of the

Marquesas Islands'6 which seem to have been conceived as purely scientific;

it was explicitly noted that some things (such as homosexual practices) might

be mentioned in such a 'private' discourse which presumably would not have

gone further.

73

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

The form of ethnographic knowledge

Many specific questions about the merits and uses of particular accounts

must arise in the practice of research. The perspicacity of writers varied, and

the nature of their work sometimes demanded greater or less attention to

such things as linguistics and ethnography. These issues obviously cannot be

pursued at a general level. Judgements must be made in particular cases, and

depend as much upon a researcher's objectives - what he or she hopes to

extract from a source - as upon the particular features of that text. My

emphasis is rather that this species of 'pre-anthropological' work has not

deserved its discredited status; that work has been rejected because of a gross

category to which it was assigned, rather than on the basis of criteria which

would also have applied to modern anthropological descriptions. As I

stressed in chapter 2, this was, of course, integral to the professionalization

of anthropology and the exclusion of unqualified persons whose experience

and linguistic competence might otherwise rival what Malinowski called 'the

Ethnographer's magic' (1922: 6). Moreover, the charge of so-called bias fails

to specify particular properties of these sorts of knowledge, which are at once

accounts in their own right and 'source materials' in various contexts.

Although the distinction between synchrony and diachrony might be seen

as a product of modern linguistic thought, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century accounts of Pacific societies were frequently divided into a narrative

of a stream of events and what amounted to a synchronic exposition - not

exactly of culture or grammar, but of manners, customs, and general

attributes. In the most important early account of Tonga, that based on

William Mariner's participant observation between 1806 and 1810, about

two-thirds is devoted to Mariner's shipwreck, difficulties, involvement in

war, adoption, and experiences in general, while most of the rest concerns

'manners, customs and sentiments' described under the following headings:

Rank in society, religious, civil and professional; Religion; Religious

Ceremonies; Knowledge; Dress; Domestic habits; Pastimes; Music and

poetry; and Language (Martin 1827, II: 81). Similarly, the Russians'

accounts of the Marquesas were divided into descriptions of meetings with

chiefs, barter, excursions inland, and so forth, and generalized accounts

of habitations - war - cannibalism - productions - religion - tabus - etc.

(Krusenstern 1813; Lisiansky 1814).

Discussion in these expository sections has an 'ethnographic' rather than

a narrative character because the objects are categories or totalities about

which general statements are made. In Crook's 'Account of the Marquesas

Islands' (1800), types of priest, forms of rank and 'usages' are detached from

any particular occurrences or manifestations. In a much later manuscript

description, Chaulet's 'Notices geographiques, enthnographiques...', we

find a similar work of induction, distinction and elaboration. In a chapter on

74

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

religion, priests and priestesses are discussed under the major categories of

tuhuka (who chanted and offered sacrifices) and tau'a (shamans; defined as

those especially charged with making known the god's will and seeing it

effected). Eleven different types of tau'a are identified, and many rituals such

as particular sacrifices are described:

To obtain a good catch, the fishermen begin by taking a long basket woven from

green coconut leaves to some sacred place, where they hang it up with a long ute strap,

so the gods of fishing felt to live there will be favourable. This is called hami oa. Then

they prepare pastes of poke and kaku [breadfruit-based preparations] which they take

with them to the place where they want to fish ... [etc.]. (Chaulet, Notices: 145)

This is a discourse of procedures and rules, not one of singularities, observed

moments, of things which happened once only. The question of happening

is in fact suppressed in a domain of generalized possibilities and situations:

fishermen do this when they go fishing; the sorcerer does this when he wants

to kill; they conduct this ceremony when a chiefly girl menstruates for the

first time. The reader's apprehension bypasses particular sorcerers and

occasions, and seizes onto the general domain of procedures, like a rule

book. The tense and register distinguishes ethnographic writing from

descriptions which do not venture into the space of partial abstraction, which

lack the vision of a whole array of seeming possibilities.

This mode of writing is found in the accounts of voyagers as well as those

of missionaries. In some cases European deserters resident on islands

interpreted and supplied intricate local information which could not possibly

have been obtained or understood in the course of brief ships' visits. But

frequently - and especially in the earliest period - there was no-one to act in

such a capacity, and explorers' interpretations are discernibly insecure. In

the voyage literature we therefore find the form of ethnographic knowledge

in the absence of its basis - linguistic competence and protracted and

intimate intercourse with a people. These requirements are axiomatic in

modern anthropology, but were virtually recognized much earlier. Cook, for

example, was aware of the limitations of the material gathered on his own

voyages. According to James Boswell, who dined with Cook and other

members of the Royal Society in April, 1776, 'he candidly confessed ... that

he and his companions who visited the south sea islands could not be certain

of any of the information they got ... their knowledge of the language was so

imperfect they required the aid of their senses, and any thing which they

learnt about religion, government or traditions might be quite erroneous'

(quoted in Cook [1961]: 234 n5). Boswell himself apparently 'fancied going

to one of the islands for three years to learn the language and bring home a

full account' but expected that if he did so he should receive a 'handsome

pension for life' from the government (ibid).

Of course, the kind of fieldwork envisaged here was not conducted until

the early twentieth century. But what distinguished modern ethnography was

75

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

its professional orientation, rather than any essential difference in the basis

of its knowledge:8 as is well known, many missionaries possessed local

knowledge and linguistic competence based on decades of experience, rather

than one or two years. In the Pacific, certain writers other than missionaries

could draw on experiences which closely approximated the ideal of

'immersion' in the local society, since these European deserters or

beachcombers acted as warriors for chieftains, married into their families,

became tattooed, and, most importantly, through their own action and

manipulation, developed a practical understanding and mastery of (altered)

indigenous tactics and strategies. These individuals were generally less

educated than the missionaries and hardly any wrote ethnographic accounts

in the stricter sense, although there are many books with titles such as

Shipwreck and adventures among the South Sea Islanders ... giving an account

of their feasts, massacres, etc. But in certain cases books were written with the

assistance of an educated man, or by him on the basis of interviews and

discussion. The most famous example is certainly the Account of the natives

of the Tonga Islands, which was written by John Martin, a doctor, on the

basis of information from William Mariner, who had lived in Tonga from

1806 to 1810. Mariner was only 15 when he survived the capture of his ship

by the Tongans and, in the view of H. E. Maude, 'assimilated the Tongan

culture as naturally as he would have his own at the same impressionable

age' (1968: 173). In these cases, the discursive construction of ethnography

is found in conjunction with what might be seen as its proper experiential

basis.

The combination of these elements does not, of course, ensure that a

description is either valid or insightful. The point is rather that the specific

problems of pre-anthropological accounts of native peoples thus cannot be

condensed into the absence of the elements of proper ethnography. The

questions which arise are as diverse as those which arise from the different

sorts of professional ethnography. No methodological distinction can be

made between a missionary ethnography and some product of modern

research which a synthesis or comparative study, draws upon. A correlate of

this equation is, however, that early ethnographic accounts cannot simply be

seen as 'sources' or raw material. Since my suggestion about Goldman's

work was partly that complications arose from inattention towards the

properties of museum ethnography, problems of the same order might arise

in the incorporation of earlier materials. These issues arise in certain ways in

properly 'ethnographic' discourses and in certain other ways in relation to

apparently less refined narratives of 'feasts, massacres, etc.'

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ethnography, physical and

social attributes were not usually radically distinguished in descriptions of

either individuals or peoples. In fact, the array of behavioural traits had a

coherent base in a sort of notion of ethnicity which consisted in physical and

76

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

mental character. This was sometimes achieved through individualizing the

'race':9 the 'Feejeean' or the 'Nukuhivan' is the type possessing attributes.

'The native of Senegal is characterized by a timorous disposition...' (Forster

1778: 227). This way of speaking makes it possible to characterize

collectivities in terms of attitudes and proclivities (this also appears in

modern writing, as in Geertz's opposition between the Javanese and

Morrocan characters cum cultural types [1968]). It is thus possible to suggest

that dispositions are engendered without reference to a collective mind or

culture. Even where statements are pluralized, observation is still essentially

in terms of propensities. A review of the first edition of Mariner's Tonga

brings out the kind of construction which specific information fed:

We behold in them the natives of a country placed under a vertical sun, endowed with

natural advantages both mental and corporeal, and with a degree of hardihood to

endure and valour to undertake, that are equal to whatsoever is known of the

inhabitants of the most vigour-giving climates; and who, in their capabilities of

attainment, are to be ranked with the highest classes of our species. At the same time,

we see them in a statement of society and of morals so barbarous that they must be

regarded as savages. Their great virtue is that which the Romans esteemed pre-

eminent, Fortitude; while their great vice is the one most common to barbarians, and

of all evil qualities the most base, Treachery. Yet, such as they are, the description

given of them frequently reminds us of the heroes in the Iliad. (Anon. 1817: 359)

The earlier nineteenth-century metropolitan interest was thus one which

constituted national types and noticed parallels between other places and

various moments in classical history and mythology. Such observations

might take the forms of naive comparisons while others articulated the

implicit evolutionary logic. These notions influenced depictions of other

parts of the world in art and theatre10 and also, no doubt, had some influence

on those who went out to the Pacific and subsequently themselves wrote

about Melanesian and Polynesian peoples. But was it therefore the case that

a rather silly set of interests amounted to an ideology which profoundly

distorted nineteenth-century representations of Pacific islanders? No,

because the discourse was neither unitary nor homogenous: there was no

specific construction which permeated it as a whole, and the various texts

were full of incompatible constructions. One reviewer of a later memoir of

experiences on a central Polynesian atoll complained that 'we have generally

but vague notions [of Pacific Islanders] compounded of the incongruous

images of cannibalism and Captain Cook' (Anon. 1868: 55). So far from

imposing stereotypes, speculative anthropology in fact provided a foil for the

descriptive authority of those who had actually visited the Pacific:

... obedience is understood as well as tyranny, and the despotism and wantonness of

the chiefs is equalled only by the correspondent timidity and submission of the people.

Philosophers are much mistaked who build systems of natural liberty. Rousseau's

savage, a being who roves the woods according to his own will, exists no where but

in his writings.

77

(Turnbull 1813: 201)

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

A more specific problem which underlay the discussion of native

propensities has already been mentioned: many writers failed to recognize

that the characteristics which were projected as the attributes of the native

type arose specifically in the circumstances of confrontation or contact. Thus

the extensive sexual contacts between Polynesian women and sailors - which

appear to have been initially motivated by a desire to bear children fathered

by apparently divine and powerful beings (Sahlins 1981: 40; Ralston 1988)

- generated an image of 'libertines' in the writings of Bougainville and many

others.11 In Portman's account of Andamanese culture the logic emerges in

a curious and qualified form:

They are gentle and pleasant to each other ... they are certainly cruel, and are jealous,

treacherous and vindictive ... [but] they are affectionate to their wives, and their worst

qualities are kept for strangers. I have often likened them to English country

schoolboys of the labouring classes...

(1899, 1: 33)

Here the context of a kind of behaviour is recognized, but it is still supposed

that a particular element, such as 'treachery', is internal to the native, and

prior to any particular incident. Portman recognized that these attributes

were only to be discerned in the interaction between Andamanese and

foreign intruders, but nevertheless saw this simply as the circumstance under

which the traits emerge or surface, rather than their cause or origin.

Cook himself attempted to contextualize what he saw as the mis-

representation of Tahitian female character:

great Injustice has been done the Women of Otaheite and the Society Isles, by those

who have represented them without exception as ready to grant the last favour to any

man who will come up to their price. But this is by no means the case; the favours

of Maried women and also the unmarried of the better sort, are as difficult to obtain

here as in any other Country whatever. Neither can the charge be understood

indiscrimenately of the unmaried of the lower class. That there are Prostitutes here as

well as in other Countrys is very true, perhaps more in proportion and such were

those who came on board the Ship to our people and frequented the Post we had on

shore ... On the whole a stranger who visits England might with equal justice draw the

Characters of the women there, from those which he might meet with on board the

Ships in one of the Naval Ports, or in the Purlieus of Covent Garden & Dury [sic]

lane.

(Cook [1961]: 238-9)

The fact that it is possible to criticize the projection of characteristic

attributes indicates that, although this kind of proposition has a systematic

presence in early accounts, and although the logic is erroneous from the

viewpoint of modern anthropology, the flaw does not obliterate the value of

the description. The analysis of the context and the critique of the judgement

in fact make it possible to read a 'source' in part as a commentary on its own

process of observation and extrapolation. It is also possible to turn its

observations, once reconstituted, towards other ends. This work of reading

is no different to what one does in drawing structuralist interpretations from

78

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

(another writer's) functionalist ethnography, or materialist insights from

accounts of myth-making.

The general claim here is that the work of predecessors - whether distant

or recent - cannot be written off on the grounds of theoretical or ideological

contamination. Functionalist premises do not animate or permeate the entire

fabric of a functionalist ethnography. The ethnographic depiction is not

generally or uniformly invalid because a major or the principal interpretative

threads are rejected. Descriptions can, in any case, be reread into something

else, and turned away from imputed errors. My critique of the ahistorical

aspect of anthropological writing suggests that problems generated by that

absence go deeper than has been previously acknowledged, but does not

thereby deny the value of the whole range of ahistorical scholarship. The

point is rather that specific misinterpretations are consistently generated.

This sort of criticism and evaluation is equally appropriate for 'pre-

anthropological' and 'professional' predecessors.

This line of argument is necessary because there is an idea of a progressive

movement in anthropological method characterized by certain sharp breaks

(notably Malinowski), as well as more gradual shifts, toward fuller

knowledge, based particularly upon 'the greater length and intensity of field

studies and the greater attention paid by ethnographers to language learning'

(A. Hooper 1985: 4). This is associated with a notion that earlier

ethnographies or pre-anthropological works are simply displaced by more

recent studies which are more securely based (meaning that they conform

more particularly to criteria of merit which happened to be current, which at

various times have privileged the collection of genealogies, of quantitative

data, of particular types of linguistic material, etc.). It would make little sense

for anyone within anthropology to deny that there has been progress in

methods at some level. My claim is rather that earlier forms of ethnography

have been discredited to an extent which is quite out of proportion to the

actual differences between such texts and modern anthropological writing.

The exercise of comparative evaluation, of asserting the merits of older or

more recent researches, is, however, ultimately misguided because it treats

the ethnographies of different epochs as substitutable for one another. Thus

a sensitive recent symbolic study might replace cruder museum ethnography;

a historically-oriented anthropologist might invert the judgements and

privilege a missionary source over something done later. A 'restudy' can be

made of an ethnographic locality twenty or thirty years later. There is an

element of likeness presupposed in this substitution, which should be seen as

misconceived because the ethnographies are not in fact accounts of the same

thing. Earlier sources may certainly have a more plausible claim to reflect a

traditional or pre-contact situation, but somewhere like Central Fiji in 1876

cannot be identified with the same place in the 1920s or 1980s - unless there

is a notion of 'Fijian culture' which stands outside time and history.12

79

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

Beyond ethnography: 'incidents' and incidental references

All general statements suppose some suppression of difference from time to

time or place, between cases and various people's versions. Even an account

of some particular sequence of events is likely to reflect some agglomeration

of accounts which obliterates the differences between distinct perspectives.

Propositions about the sorts of behaviour which should or do take place

between certain classes of relatives presumably depend on numerous

observations and statements. Questions can be raised at any point in an

analysis about whether particular moments in the suppression of difference

are desirable. The answer will depend primarily on the interests and purposes

implicit in a piece of writing. In some cases discussing the differences between

two towns or villages might contribute nothing more than mindless empirical

elaboration; in other cases such detail and contrasts might fuel an analysis

of economic and political processes in a region (cf. C. White 1981). The

divergent claims of different informants might equally be inconsequential or

crucial (cf. Young 1983: 3, 53, passim). Suppressing the difference between

' Fijian culture' as apprehended at certain dates is thus a variant upon a more

general and necessary movement, and might be seen to be no more

problematic or pernicious than other constructions which smudge their

sources. But the content of these inductive steps varies. In some cases, the

exclusion of variation simply precludes a certain kind of analysis: how

children and adults see the house, or work, differently. Other dimensions of

difference are more fundamental, and play a part in the constitution of

notions which are already internal to an analysis. Anthropological

explanations which attempt to go beyond an account of the positional order

of social or cultural features at a particular time must raise questions about

the logic of transformations, of how a system in a particular place arises

when other possibilities apparently exist. A study of palm economies in

eastern Indonesia, for instance, revealed that a pattern of difference which

might have been explained in terms of ecological adaptations can be

accounted for far more persuasively through reference to the history of local

political conflicts, Dutch trading activities, and various other factors (Fox

1977). The suppression of the historical process thus leads to error rather

than simply omission. This is what can be seen to take place in Handy's

misinterpretation of Marquesan chieftainship.

If it is acknowledged that differences over time matter, then early accounts

become significant in a way which has nothing to do with the extent to which

they conform or fail to conform with notions of what ethnography should be.

Societies beyond Europe and the 'civilized' centres were potential objects

of research for professional anthropologists because prior contacts and

expressions of force had established ways into them, and perhaps pacified

warriors or extended colonial jurisdiction. In general, the people to be known

80

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

were controlled to some degree. Intrusive institutions such as missions and

administrative posts were easily recognized as isolable entities by anthro-

pologists and might be mentioned but were cut out of the central

ethnographic discussion. There was a sense that the consequences of

intrusion could be traced around such discrete manifestations of penetration.

The subtraction of these specific effects from the overall picture left an image

of the traditional. In all cases of interaction between traders or settlers and

indigenous populations, there are, however, more subtle processes whereby

external effects generate internal change. A variety of early accounts are

significant because they speak directly about the events which constitute such

change, about the conditions which make description possible and always

already transform the thing described. The facts spoken of do not fall within

the domain of ethnological subject-matter: they are events which happen

sometimes once, sometimes again and again, not 'customs', institutions or

symbols. The cultural dimensions of such acts or accidents may sometimes

be suggested by renderings in oral or written sources, but may not be overtly

acknowledged.

If notions or practices constitute a tradition which is cognized as such,

both indigenous peoples and observers may have an interest in disguising the

causal relations between the form of culture and historical processes, as

Keesing acknowledged in a Solomon Islands case:

I arrived among the Kwaio announcing my intention to record their customs. I

gradually learned that the Kwaio had sacrificed and prayed to enlist me in their cause,

as an American who was going to 'write' and 'straighten out' Kwaio custom

(kastom) for them... As long as I collected genealogies, recorded stories of ancestors,

explored the structures of kinship, feasting, and exchange, recorded ancestrally

policed taboos, and sat in on weekly meetings where 'chiefs'... debated intricacies of

land rights and customary law and adjudicated in litigation, my work and the

expectation of traditionalist (male) leaders meshed closely ... Indeed, their politically

motivated commitment to (the impossible task of) codifying customary law and my

theoretically motivated commitment to (the impossible task of) writing a 'cultural

grammar' in the manner of Goodenough, Conklin, and Frake doubtless, in

retrospect, entailed a good deal of mutual cooptation.

(1985: 28-9)

This also suggests that the processes behind whatever configurations have

been rendered 'traditional' cannot necessarily be discerned internally. This

must be the case to an especially marked extent if exchanges and interactions

with outsiders have a long history.

The earliest contacts between representatives of a European world and

islanders entailed various sorts of barter, theft, and exchange - acts which

effected movements of objects between ships and island societies. Much has

been written on the technological 'stone to steel' transition, but rather less

on local constructions of apparently utilitarian objects of desire, which were

often assimilated into indigenous categories of prestigious or ritually

significant things. While this literature has perhaps therefore sustained a

81

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

restricted view of the ramifications of change, more complex questions about

political relationships and hierarchy certainly emerge if the importation of

things which might loosely be described as 'valuables' is considered. The

circulation of indigenous prestige objects was frequently restricted in certain

ways. Their uses were linked with hierarchy and particular elite strategies,

which could hardly have been sustained had supplies and distribution not

been controlled, or if overall quantities precluded monopolization. In so far

as hierarchical relations themselves were constituted and perpetuated

through the use of particular gift-objects, one would expect the structure to

be transformed by any significant mutation in patterns of exchange - such as

the sudden availability of a new supply of the objects.

Throughout Fiji, the 'greatest of valuables' was the whale's tooth or

tabua. Gifts of tabua were and are essential elements of many ceremonies

connected with marriage, death, birth and chiefly installation. Teeth could be

used to solicit services, and initiate political alliances or cycles of exchange.

These ceremonial uses are extensively described in numerous twentieth-

century ethnographies (e.g. Thompson 1940; Sahlins 1962; Nayacakalou

1975). None of these authors mention the fact that, whereas tabua are now

widely distributed, and are used in commoner villages as well as in chiefly

centres, this cannot have been the case in the past, because the only sources

for teeth were whales which were occasionally stranded on coral reefs. As this

seems to have happened more often in Tonga than Fiji, supplies depended on

external contacts rather than what might be collected locally. Attempts to

form even rough ideas of the numbers of tabua in circulation at earlier times

would be futile, but there is no doubt that these objects were extremely scarce

before contact with Europeans. Very soon afterwards, the situation was very

different, as Clunie has explained:

With the onset of the sandal wood trade from 1804, some thousands of Sperm Whale

teeth and of elephant and walrus tusks cut to resemble Whale teeth were imported by

Yankee, Colonial (New South Wales) and East India traders, who instantly

recognized their incredibly high intrinsic worth in Viti [early Fiji].

(1986: 176-7; cf. Hooper 1982: 85-9)

The quantity introduced was certainly very considerable: an 1809 newspaper

item indicates that one ship alone was carrying 190 teeth for trade in Fiji (Im

Thurn and Wharton 1925: 200). The significance of the number emerges if

it is noted that one of the largest tributary prestations recorded only ten, and

that one tooth was sufficient as a bounty for an assassination (Williams 1931

[1843], I: 145; Brewster 1922: 27-8; cf. Hooper 1982: 93).

It is moreover clear that there have been a whole series of changes in both

the volume of external supplies and the manner of their importation. After

the dramatic initial increase associated with the trade in sandalwood (stands

of which were rapidly exhausted), there was an interval when foreign traders

82

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

were uninterested in extracting any resources from Fiji; contact was renewed

when a trade in beche-de-mer, also destined for the Chinese market,

developed and brought in new supplies of whale teeth. Clunie argued that the

great increase in numbers of tabua permitted chiefs, who apparently

successfully monopolized the objects, to intensify and elaborate their

political activity: expansive efforts and conflict between chiefly con-

federations therefore increased dramatically in the first decades of the

nineteenth century. In the longer term, however, Steven Hooper suggests that

the use of whale teeth has been 'democratized' (1982: 87), but it is not clear

precisely whether a range of ceremonial acts, or specifically the use of tabua

in those acts, have ceased to be exclusively the prerogatives of chiefs. In the

earlier period it is clear that the supply of whale teeth was itself the cause of

change, whereas subsequent patterns of distribution may have arisen as

much because of transformations in the hierarchical system as because of

qualitative shifts in the supply of valuables.

These changes do not all belong to the distant past. Earlier in the twentieth

century many tabua were taken out of Fiji by Europeans passing through or

returning home, but the decline in numbers was arrested when their export

was prohibited; there was in fact an increase, because some hundreds were

imported from Scotland and distributed by the administration in the 1950s

(Hooper 1982: 86). In a study of economic development, Belshaw implied

that there was a more general government policy of 'injecting cheap supplies

from time to time' which, he argued, permitted 'ceremonial inflation' (1964:

150); this was disapproved of because it hindered 'the growth of the

economy'.

It would be manifestly misleading to suggest in this kind of case that a

system might be identified and analysed primarily in non-historical, internal

terms. This would situate the causes of elements of the system internally,

when such elements are in fact clearly the products of the conjunction of

external causes and internal dynamics. Even prior to European contact, it is

clear that changing relations with other island groups (such as Tonga) had

an impact on Fijian political structures.

Such incidents as constituted the barter which brought whale teeth into

Fiji cannot thereby be seen as merely 'incidental'. They bear directly on

problems at the core of anthropological inquiry. The implication of this for

the ascription of various statuses to kinds of sources of information is that

accounts which have a strictly ethnographic character - such as a modern

study or something like Chaulet's description of Marquesan beliefs - cannot

be seen to constitute a core of material to which references to events are

secondary. This logic is inevitable if the anthropological object is defined in

a way which excludes change or renders it subsequent to native culture, the

primary entity. The tendency in anthropological writing has been to dismiss

accounts of moments or events because they apparently fail to bear upon

83

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

strictly ethnographic questions, or because, in so far as they do, they are

wrong. Firth cites a sailor's mistaken belief that Tikopia men were castrated

as proof of 'the utter worthlessness of casual observation derived from the

stay of a day or so which the Southern Cross and other vessels make' (1936:

408). This criticism is, of course, a motivated one, in that it separates

anthropological knowledge from the error-prone vision of stray travellers. It

is also legitimate, since it would be remarkable if ethnographers (and other

resident foreigners) did not have a better knowledge of local matters than

visitors who had only had sporadic contact with a population. But this is not

the point. Most of the people who visit places, whether inhabited by tribal

people or others, on continents or islands, do so because they want to do

something, which frequently entails transactions or other social acts which

have effects. What they say about what they do may be crucial, no matter

how obtuse or misguided their overall understanding may be.

A trader visiting an atoll near the Society Islands might note that pigs were

received 'in exchange for hatchets, scissors, knives, paper, looking glasses,

&c.' (Turnbull 1813: 264). The fact that certain islanders travelled with the

ship and visited other parts of Polynesia is also noted. These observations

clearly are not ethnographic facts of any recognizable kind, and isolated

reports are of limited significance in themselves. But only the totality of such

fragments can reveal the fundamental changes brought about by barter and

make sense of the efforts of certain islanders to emulate mythologized

versions of Polynesian histories on other islands (Thomas 1986a: 13). In the

same way, a missionary's note that 1,522 lb. of arrowroot was collected (to

be exported and sold for the mission) from a district in Samoa says nothing

about customs or social structure but does bear upon changes in production

and the apparent perpetuation of old competitive displays under a new

missionary regime - 'the plan was for each village and town to come

separately and in order; we received their parcels of arrowroot' (Slayter

1843: 54).

If these events are as important as I have maintained, then anthropological

practice should be different. The ethnographic experience and the statements

of a man or woman may have the feel of truth, the sense of 'direct

knowledge' of a society or culture. Needless to say, representations of social

or cultural attributes are abstractions arrived at through analytical work,

and are no more visible than the unconscious. Moreover, the data drawn into

the picture arise from the structured experience of the ethnographer, and, if

elicited, may take a form (even prior to their representation by the analyst)

which they would never take in his or her absence. Still, next to this

immediacy, the interpretation of passages in old handwriting or out-of-print

books, peppered with pious judgements or racist allusions, may seem

hopelessly distant from a living system. These words may, however, reflect

the absent causes in the living group: happenings which shape practice or

84

Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

arrangements, but which are not known or spoken of. This implies an

anthropological reading of phenomena which are scattered and dispersed

outside the bounds of strictly anthropological concerns, a reading of

incidents, accidents and misunderstandings - but these turn out to be more

systemic than the marginal, residual constitution of events and change

beyond the systems envisaged in conventional paradigms would permit one

to expect.

Some of the perpetrators of pious reflection and racial stereotyping, or of

the events which disrupted 'our' object, the traditional system, ventured to

write ethnography before its time. These treatises somehow turn out to be

only partly motivated by projects we would eschew; we find that they are

frequently structured by a systematizing impulse which is suspicious in what

it does to evidence but also suspiciously like our own practice. These

discourses might stimulate deeper scrutiny of our own knowledge-project,

but are also there to be more innocently read: it is not as though ethnography

belongs to the present and history to the past.

85

7

Evolution of another sort: regional

systems theory and the Pacific

What becomes of evolutionary theories under the different intellectual

circumstances of contemporary anthropology? Is it in any sense desirable to

further elaborate such ideas?

In the fourth and sixth chapters I focussed primarily on the connections

between sources, forms of evidence and methods, and interpretations which

are mostly seen to be worked out at some distinct level. The fifth chapter

aimed to illustrate the argument by sketching out the discrepancy between

one theory of Polynesian social evolution and another, based on different

forms of evidence and different dealings with the same forms. The point was

not epistemological pluralism - the facile observation that a set of facts can

sustain diverse interpretations - but rather that the different readings were,

to the contrary, partly implicit in methods and the data as constituted. The

deeply-seated and salient metaphor of discourse as a building or edifice with

'levels' (especially of abstraction) is particularly pernicious in this context;

more apt would be the vision of a tangled forest, in which life-substances are

drawn invisibly from above and below, the attributes of an elevated leaf

structure having a hidden, conditioning, relationship with the form and

content of soil and litter. A secondary forest, of course: all our efforts take

place on top of others, constrained yet displacing; the ground impoverished,

but perhaps also enriched by fire.

The epistemological argument is not an end in itself. I shift the focus now

to the question of the value of an untangled or differently tangled approach

to evolution and history - which, although situated in the Pacific, has wider

implications, and leads back to more general questions of anthropological

practice and epistemology.

The regional systems perspective

One nexus between contemporary anthropology and evolutionism can be

traced to the discussions and revisions of Marxist anthropology in the 1970s

(see e.g. Bloch 1975; Godelier 1977; Seddon 1978; and the journal Critique

of Anthropology). These were hardly focussed on evolutionary questions,

86

Evolution of another sort.: regional systems theory and the Pacific

since such matters as the larger frame of international economic inequalities

were of more pressing concern, but nevertheless entailed some critique and

reworking of both Marxist evolutionary categories and American neo-

evolutionist theory (of the sort developed by Julian Steward [1955] and

others). There were debates about modes of production, their (sequential?)

associations, the nature of transitions, class formation, and determination in

general. The process of modification and reconstruction arguably went so far

that by the late seventies the discussion had virtually lost any distinctively

Marxist character. In particular, claims that relations of production played

a crucial determining role were not sustained. The 'post-Marxist' emphasis

on relations which might formerly have been considered superstructural, and

on the reproduction of hierarchical structures perhaps therefore ends up

having less in common with materialist antecedents than with the sort of

exercise attempted by Goldman, which stressed aspects of social organisation

and status rather than production.

These trends were perhaps most clearly reflected in a paper by Kajsa

Ekholm which was originally published in 1976 (Ekholm 1981; cf. Friedman

and Rowlands 1977). One of the key steps is that away from 'stages'

or modes of production identified on the basis of local societies towards

transformations linking distinct forms, which were understood to arise

from the specific properties of systems of appropriation, exchange, and

hierarchical reproduction. If, as in earlier approaches, the starting point was

the construction of social types such as 'bands', 'chiefdoms', 'early states'

or modes of production, transitions between these rigidified forms

automatically become problematic. Evolution is detached from the internal

properties of society at any particular stage, and is confined to the changes

from one form to another. The contrasting concern with connections

between the short-term dynamics of a particular form of reproduction and

the longer-term dynamics of transformation may bridge the gap between

questions about the entities generally observed, namely functioning systems

of particular types, and questions about the transition from one type to

another. Thus the huge literature about the origin of 'the' state may display

an obsession with an issue which would not have seemed as dramatic or

inexplicable if processes in a wider variety of hierarchical polities had been

taken into account.

The other crucial shift is that away from the single society as the unit of

analysis. As Ekholm (especially) stressed, there is a crucial link between this

question and the perception of social variation. Two societies, seen as

separate cases, may differ dramatically with respect to such traits as the

elaboration of elite culture, specialized craft production, political central-

ization, and stratification. An evolutionary difference may be read from the

presence of these features in one case and their absence in another. However,

if in a particular region, such societies are viewed in terms of larger systems

87

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

of exchange relations, it can be argued that what appears in one case as

development or innovation, and in the other as the lack thereof, in fact

reflects something like a centre-periphery relation between the two; that is,

relations of unequal exchange, together with the centre's monopoly over the

widest field of relations, generate the characteristics of 'advanced' or

'backward' groups, which would have no meaning if the framework of

relations did not exist. Ideas along these lines have, of course, been

extensively discussed by many writers concerned with imperialism and

specifically with exposing the notion that the unfavourable position of third-

world countries derives from an internal 'underdevelopment' rather than the

constraints and impositions of the world system. Such writers have often left

the anthropological notion of the more-or-less 'cold' traditional society

intact by dealing exclusively with disruption and change consequent upon

capitalist penetration. The undesirable and often tragic character of such

changes also tends to some idealization of the undisturbed past. The

importance of Ekholm's contribution is that it extends an analysis of

approximately the same sort back to earlier 'civilizations' (such as

Mesopotamia) and to smaller-scale regional systems in general:

On the central plateau of Madagascar a spectacular evolution took place between the

end of the eighteenth century and the French occupation at the end of the nineteenth

century. As long as the field of inquiry is confined to this region there is nothing which

directly contradicts the idea that development is driven by internal forces. Industry

and trade expand. A greater area is exploited for irrigated rice, the slave population

greatly increases, and developed state and class structures emerge, etc. If, however,

the field is broadened to include events in the southeast, the expansion on the plateau

becomes more complicated. During the same period the southeast experienced an

equally spectacular devolution. Before the expansion on the plateau there were

kingdoms and a relatively well developed economy in the southeast. The following

evolution on the plateau is accompanied by a successive economic underdevelopment

and political fragmentation in the southeast. This simultaneous development and

underdevelopment can only be understood by placing Madagascar as a whole in a

larger 'global' system in which Western Europe is the major expanding area. The

relation between this expansion and the shift in trade patterns on Madagascar

(ultimately derivable from the power struggle between France and England in the

Indian Ocean) is the fundamental dynamic in the evolution/devolution process.

(Ekholm 1981: 244-5)

It is not important here that Ekholm makes no attempt to substantiate this

argument. Our concern is with the theoretical implications of the form of

interpretation. The analysis is an 'evolutionary' one in the sense that it is

concerned with structural change and development, with transformations

linking (comparatively) 'primitive' and 'complex' systems. The discussion is,

however, drained of much of the colour and resonance of classic

evolutionism. The temporal metaphor which discriminates between societies

is disabled: 'earlier' and more 'advanced' forms are represented as outcomes

88

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

of unitary processes, rather than something like the absence (in the primitive

case) of time and growth - which is, of course, ultimately directed towards

the elevated specialization and rationality of our own system. A vast amount

of popular scholarship has been written along evolutionary lines precisely

because evolution has a broader cultural meaning (e.g. Sagan 1985).

Goldman's argument was more sophisticated and qualified, than those

advanced by most nineteenth-century theorists, but even in his work we find

social variation subordinated to a logic of increasing stratification. Ekholm's

perspective suppresses this directional aspect and thus becomes detached

from that specific array of larger ideological meanings, which discriminated

in both the neutral and pernicious senses. The symbolic efficacy of

evolutionary categories is thus attenuated, but the door is opened for a

different kind of talk which perhaps in the end can bear as directly upon a

wider interest in the international economy and the struggles and social

categories it generates. It would be desirable if one sort of evolutionary

discourse informed some undoing of the system which an earlier evolutionary

discourse legitimated, but to expect this would undoubtedly be to exaggerate

the efficacy of scholarly theorizing.

Obviously the centre-periphery dynamics emphasized by Ekholm do not

themselves provide sufficiently specific mechanisms to account for the wider

array of local and supra-local processes. The key notion which permits more

specific explanation is that of the system of reproduction. This implies some

sort of specification of key features which have the effect of reproducing

particular hierarchies or social relations, generating developmental processes

and cycles, events and longer-term dynamics.

'Prestige-goods systems' in Oceania

The construct of the 'prestige-goods system' illustrates this analysis and,

incidentally, exemplifies the general trends in neo-Marxist reformulation

alluded to above. The concept was derived from Ekholm's study of the

Kongo kingdom of central west Africa and was subsequently generalized in

Friedman and Rowlands' model of the evolution of 'civilization' (Ekholm

1977; Friedman and Rowlands 1977: 224-8).

A prestige-goods system is understood as a particular development of the

sort of small-scale state which is essentially a federation of graded clans. The

basis for dominance changes from genealogical rank to control over foreign

exchange, which is very frequently a source of valuables rather than (or as

well as) mundane things. The valuable objects, in this system, are not mere

expressions of rank, but rather play a crucial role as exchange items, because

they are essential elements in important transactions such as marriage

exchanges or mortuary ceremonies even at lower rank levels. Their

monopolization therefore creates in itself a degree of dependence. The basic

89

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

hierarchical relationship between a centralizing, monopolizing power and

subordinate places entails exchange of tribute against prestige goods. This

asymmetrical exchange acquires a larger systemic character outside a strictly

'economic' domain because it is linked with a generalized exchange

marriage system, that is, one in which group A gives husbands to B, B gives

them to C, and so on. If there is a marriage rule it would amount to

matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. Such systems normally have hierarchical

content because wife-takers rank higher than wife-givers, but contradictions

may arise if the closed nature of the system means that at some point Z must

take a wife from A. In prestige-goods systems this problem need not arise,

because the highest-ranking group, which is of course also that which

monopolizes external trade, can give daughters to its foreign-exchange

partners, which may be desirable for political reasons anyway. The overall

relationship thus produces a movement of wives and tribute up a hierarchy of

groups, in the opposite direction to prestige-goods. The longer-term

monopoly may be assured if the prestige-goods are perishable or effectively

consumed in some context, such as in burials. These relations, of course, have

spatial content: movement 'down' and 'up' the hierarchy entails movement

between centres and peripheries. In some cases, such as that described by

Ekholm, residence is uxorilocal, meaning that higher-ranking men move

from the aristocratic centres to subordinate places (which may effect political

control). These relations, according to Friedman and Rowlands, therefore

tend to create a pattern of (cultural?) oppositions: higher-ranking men/

lower-ranking women, nobles/commoners, invaders/indigenous inhabitants,

etc. (1977: 226). Some of these features persist after the system is transformed

into something else, and the argument may help explain the very widespread

oppositions in (for instance) parts of west Africa between 'local' commoners

and chiefs from outside (e.g. Fortes 1949b). The crucial role of external trade

may also lead to a dual chieftainship separating religious and secular

(executive) functions.

Friedman applied these ideas to the Pacific in an article entitled 'Notes on

structure and history in Oceania' (1981). The argument was essentially that

early Austronesian societies ancestral to Melanesian and Polynesian systems

- that is, those existing in Melanesia about 4,000 years ago - were prestige-

goods systems, and that the historical distribution of social forms in the

region reflects various transformations of this original system. The evidence

for the early system was essentially that (a) kin terminology reconstructed

through historical linguistics indicated generalized exchange and dualism,

and (b) long-distance trade was suggested by the distribution of traceable

obsidian items in early Melanesian Lapita sites.

Friedman suggested that the overall trend in Melanesia was towards an

increase in 'trade density' and more specialized, short-distance trade. This

was in part a correlate of increasingly dense settlement, and in particular the

90

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

settlement of upland areas, which took place in the course of the region's

prehistory. The increase in density led, Friedman suggested, to a breakdown

of former monopolies over trade and consequently of hierarchy. The result

is the pattern of competitive, relatively egalitarian 'big-man' systems so

much discussed in Melanesian anthropology. In a few areas, such as the

Trobriands and New Caledonia, trade monopoly, chieftainship, and other

elements of prestige-goods systems persisted or subsequently re-emerged.

Friedman has relatively little to say either about southern Vanuatu or Fiji,

both areas in which documented hierarchical structures rest uneasily with the

prestige-goods model, but claims that in western Polynesia, 'full-blown'

prestige-goods systems existed. Certainly, there is evidence that Fiji, Samoa

and Tonga were involved in a regional exchange system which linked up with

internal hierarchies; that spouses and prestige objects such as red feathers (to

be woven into mats) were central to these larger relations; that internally

tribute was exchanged against valuables; that chiefs attempted to create and

maintain monopolies; and that, particularly in Tonga, sacred/secular

distinctions emerged in paramount chiefly titles (Kaeppler 1978; Hjarno

1979/80; Gunson 1979).

In eastern Polynesia, on the other hand, it is suggested that a sort of

inversion of the Melanesian process took place: external exchange became

less significant not because of an increase in the density of trade networks,

but because increasing distances between islands made trade impossible.

Friedman's suggestion is that the basis of political dominance then shifted to

a sort of religious despotism manifested in a great elaboration of prohibitions

(tapu restrictions) connected with chiefly status. The loss of trade monopoly

supposedly led also to greater competition between chiefs, reflected in

agricultural intensification and greater mobilisation of surpluses (which were

directed into potlach-style feasting). On Tahiti and Hawaii chiefly efforts

to unify polities were relatively successful, while in many other cases

(Marquesas, Easter Island, Mangaia) intensification allegedly failed, pro-

ducing a decline in hierarchy, instability, famine, and intense but unresolvable

competition.

Although condensed and somewhat insensitive to the intricacies of the

evidence, Friedman's argument represents a significant advance upon

Goldman's theory. Although his reasons for stressing the contrasts between

eastern and western Polynesia turn out to be questionable, Friedman's model

does attempt to explain a whole pattern of systematic difference which was

acknowledged but passed over by Goldman's account. The integration of

Polynesian transformations with Melanesian processes is also an important

step, given the recognition which has developed that these major cultural

regions not only merge but were linked by processes of settlement and

linguistic diversification (Golson 1971; Green 1979; Kirch 1984: 44-48;

Pawley 1981). Some of the main contrasts between them turn out to be

91

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

aspects of explorers' representations and anthropological models rather than

social realities.

The subordination of variation to a teleology of increasing centralization,

stratification and eventual class formation, in which Hawaii or Tonga is seen

as the apex of Polynesian development, is rejected by Friedman. The

argument is rather that features of systems of social reproduction in a certain

ancestral type give rise to an array of 'descendent' societies under differing

historical and ecological conditions. This is not to assume that each society

follows an isolated, divergent path of local development once it has separated

from other groups; continuing contact, regional relations, and certain kinds

of pre-capitalist 'dependent development' may be variously important, but

all can be integrated into an account of structural transformation. Evolution

is not a principle to be played off against others (such as diffusion).'

In broader terms the approach depends upon constructing an ancestral

society, a systemic starting point, from which subsequent variations are

derived. The subsequent pattern is typically what is found across space at a

particular time. A complex of ethnographic diversity can thus be rendered as

the mutations of a structure or set of structures. The exercise differs from a

more conventional kind of comparison within regions, which simply notes

patterns of covariation, perhaps linked with a functional argument about

associations between particular elements, which suppose at least implicitly

some unspecified kind of synchronic transformation. However, the sort of

exercise attempted by Friedman could tend to collapse into something more

reminiscent of the earlier style of analysis, because it is difficult to sustain the

necessary historical and evolutionary content which differentiates an

argument about structural change from the mere rendering of contrasts and

differences in terms of temporal or processual metaphors. This is simply to

say that there may be gaps between the theory enunciated and that worked

out in practice.

In fact, there turn out to be theoretical as well as more empirical problems

with Friedman's analysis. Like Goldman, he reproduces the classic

evolutionist fallacy of treating (contemporary) society A as an earlier stage

of society B. The distinction in the case of Goldman's work was that the logic

was disconnected from any possible sequence of historical settlement and

development. In Friedman's view, both the regions of earlier and latest

settlement - Melanesia and eastern Polynesia - underwent transformation,

but the west Polynesian societies in the middle are explicitly understood as

the perpetuation of earlier prestige-goods systems: 'the old prestige-good

system is preserved until quite late' (1981: 292); while eastern Polynesia is

read effectively as the transformation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

western forms, which 'broke down very early' (ibid: 287; cf. 1985: 200-1).

Apart from general objections to the notion that hierarchical systems which

were obviously fluid should not have changed structurally over some 2,000

92

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

years, this suggestion of continuity in Samoa and Tonga (and also eastern

Fiji?) is problematic on historical and archaeological grounds.2

The notion that the prestige-goods systems broke down in the east because

of the quantum increase in distances between island groups seems entirely

reasonable when one glances at a map of the Pacific: it is clear that, in the

west, the islands are large and relatively close together, and one can envisage

frequent contact which would seem impossible in the vast space between the

dots in the more profoundly insular environment of eastern Polynesia. The

problem with this observation is that it ignores that fact that most of the

eastern Polynesian islands are in groups, within which distances are often

short, and within which regular trade (as opposed to occasional, accidental

drift) was feasible. Although the evidence for such exchange makes it difficult

to establish its social importance, there is no doubt that it took place. In the

Marquesas trade linking southern and northern parts of the group involved

movements of parrot feathers, adze stone, processed turmeric, kava, and no

doubt other things. Because the primary social groups were mata'eina'a or

'tribes' which normally inhabited one valley, this trade did constitute a form

of external exchange which could theoretically have been monopolized.

There is abundant evidence for contact and barter between Tahiti and

certain other islands. Apart from the frequent contact and politico-religious

connections with the windward group of the Society Islands (Huahine,

Raiatea and Borabora), there were links more dedicated to exchange with

smaller and more peripheral islands such as Me'etia in the east, and via that

island (as well as perhaps more directly) with the Tuamotu archipelago

(Oliver 1974, I: 213-4). Being atolls, the Tuamotus were strong in pearls and

pearl shell, but lacked certain foodstuffs and other 'high island' resources

such as volcanic stone for adze blades; their inhabitants thus had basic

reasons for maintaining a trade which served more elite concerns in Tahiti.

Since the Bounty mutineer Morrison specifically noted that the contact

between Me'etia and Tahiti was run by the chief of the Taiarapu district (in

the island's eastern peninsula, Tahitit Iti) (1935: 201), there is evidence not

merely for the possibility of a prestige-goods system but for the monopo-

lization of certain external exchange links which draw in valuables. Yet it is

clear that this control was not crucial politically, and that both the

reproduction of hierarchy in a systemic sense and more immediate political

jockeying depended primarily on things other than the manipulation of

trade.

External exchange certainly did become impossible in a few cases, such as

Easter Island and Rapa - islands so isolated that it is remarkable that they

were settled at all. In other parts of the Austral group (to the south and

south-west of Tahiti), and Mangareva, the substantial distances appear to

have made contact much more restricted than it was in the Societies and

Tuamotus. It is notable, however, that historical processes on Rapanui, in

93

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

the Marquesas, and on Mangareva, appear to have been broadly similar. In

each case (but to a varying degree) the pattern of changes noted in chapter

5 took place: there were shifts in power away from chiefs and towards

landholders or warriors, and certain changes in religion (toward more

'inspired' activity). These were least marked in Mangareva and most extreme

on Easter Island. The results of broadly similar ecological processes are also

apparent: upland forests were lost, consequent erosion narrowed the

resource base; in some cases innovative modes of intensive production (such

as the cultivation of breadfruit in the Marquesas) were developed. Some of

the islands upon which these processes took place are extremely isolated, and

others are in island groups, but the possibility of supra-local contact and

exchange was evidently not crucial.

These points imply that external exchange is given too much weight in

Friedman's model. His view is certainly that its presence, absence, or density

produces divergent systems, given that the starting point is a prestige-goods

system. Yet it is especially clear from the Tahitian evidence that certain

preconditions for a prestige-goods system may exist without such a system in

fact developing. The bases of hierarchical reproduction in eastern Polynesia

are not absolutely clear, but there is no doubt that control of exchange was

not a significant factor before interaction with European traders. It may be

the case that 'theocratic feudalism' sometimes does emerge when a prestige-

goods system is extended or transported to an area where external exchange

is impossible, but this argument is of no relevance to the Polynesian

situation, because such a system could in fact have existed in parts of eastern

Polynesia. It is, in any case, necessary to reject the supposition that the

western Polynesian societies were in fact prestige-goods systems 2,000 years

ago, when the colonizing move into eastern Polynesia probably took place:

a range of archaeological and traditional evidence indicates that the regional

integration upon which the eighteenth-century system depended was in fact

a much more recent development (Davidson 1977, 1978; Kirch 1984).

The question then arises of the conditions which promote the development

of hierarchical reproduction on the basis of external connections and

monopoly rather than tributary transactions in kind, control of religion and

the means of production, and so on. Since, in Friedman's explanation, the

prestige-goods system is the starting point, it is not in itself explained: there

is no theory of where such a system comes from, or of the circumstances

under which a hierarchical polity should take that particular turn. Given that

explanations have to start somewhere, with a society in history, this is in

general a legitimate procedure, but ceases to be so in this case if the historical

discontinuity between the western Polynesian societies observed in the late

eighteenth century and the ancestral system is recognized: the prestige-goods

system becomes another late development which a model of transformations

must account for.

94

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

Theoretical implications

An earlier section of my argument could be recapitulated (or reinvented) as

follows: the anthropological object has always been a social or cultural unity.

The understandings of what constitutes this system (or structure) were and

are extremely diverse, but a general feature has been that the systemic

character of the domain has been erected and sustained in opposition to

events and history. The most general form of analysis predicates a part/whole

relation in the sense that the significance (and explanation) of a ritual or

institution arises from its functional or meaningful coherence in a totality.

The work of analysis demonstrates the connection by revealing the context

or larger meaning of what is initially singular or puzzling. Past events are

understood almost as random or arbitrary, and take place outside the

system. This exclusion was initially justified on the basis of the unknowable

character of prehistoric contacts between (or changes within) non-literate

societies, but was extended to the events of European contact or colonial

histories in areas such as (parts of) Africa and the Pacific where there were

sharp gaps between the pre-European traditional past and documented

erosions or transformations of traditional cultures. No such sharp break

existed in most Asian contexts, but the complexities of history were seen as

injecting richness and diversity without in any sense having a processual or

systemic character which might have been linked with matters closer to the

heart of anthropological analysis.

'History' or 'a historical perspective' can apparently be added to or

discussed at the same time as 'culture' and 'the social system' but in fact no

serious integration is possible unless the exclusions which constitute the latter

objects are broken down.

A model which has as its central concern the transformation of 'global' or

regional systems of reproduction breaks from more conventional an-

thropological approaches in a number of ways. It is not alone in insisting

upon a supra-local vision, in demanding that attention be paid to larger

economic entanglements, but is perhaps exceptional in its emphasis upon the

significance of such larger connections in pre-colonial or pre-capitalist

contexts. The perspective thus further erodes the dichotomies associated with

'us' and 'them', whereby the west, or some category of civilized or 'hot'

societies, exists in history and is subject to constant transformation, while

other systems are not constituted historically in the same way. At one level,

this opposition is discredited, but is sustained implicitly in anthropological

practice in the division of theoretical approaches: crudely, Europe is

analysed historically, the 'third-world' and peasant societies are placed in

their historical and international economic context, but tribals are somehow

particularly amenable to symbolic analysis which passes over such dynamics

and processes. The conceptual reorientation thus has ideological implica-

95

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

tions: it assists in the complicated job of extricating anthropology from

playful but pernicious representations of 'others' as inversions or origins of

our modernity.

For anthropological theory, it is more significant that transformations are

situated at the core of the analysis and are directly linked with the properties

of the social system. If changes and short-term fluctuations incorporate or

equate with history and events, then what were antithetical in former

understandings are now rendered indissociable. There have been many

revisions and departures in recent anthropology, but this break - if effectively

expressed in analysis - would be crucial, because it bears upon, and causes a

shift in, the constitution of the discipline's objects. Something like 'systemic

history' is substituted for 'system' (of whatever sort).

The theoretical programme implied by regional systems theory equally has

implications for the practice of historical analysis: it does not simply

incorporate an existing methodology and link it with a set of concepts. The

form of contextualization which most historical writing employs is still the

situating of events and circumstances in chronological narrative, although

this master-context is partially subordinated to thematic concerns (such as

class analysis, gender, popular culture and so on). Discussions of the

systemic ramifications or characteristics of events thus tend to be marginal to

the story or account, and a matter of tentative generalization rather than

contextualization. (There are of course many exceptions, such as works

which attempt to construct a system and trace its development through

historical processes [e.g. Ste. Croix 1981].) Although reviewing historical

analysis in any extensive way is beyond the scope of this study, it can be said

that just as a theory of social transformations redefines the anthropological

context, it substitutes structured historical processes and dynamics for

narrative.

Regional systems in colonial history

These radical implications of the regional systems model emerge in the

specific context of the examination of processes consequent upon the

engagement of 'traditional' hierarchical systems with the expanding west. As

was noted above, the discussion of such changes in contemporary

anthropology constituted the residual object of 'social change', generally

seen as an unsystematic sequence of loosely connected happenings (the

intrusion of Christian missions, changes in work, introduction of cash, etc.).

Explanations in this domain were typically weaker and more particular than

those concerned with elements of the system proper.

On the other hand, the transformations which figure in a regional systems

model can have immediate causes which are either internal or external, and

96

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

(so far as the latter are concerned) can arise either from interaction with

similar regional systems or colonizing powers. There is no overriding

distinction between causes which are intrinsic to the anthropological object,

and those which stem from what are construed as intrusions or irruptions. As

has already been explained, Ekholm's model of the prestige-goods system

focusses on the control of external exchange. Having described the

functioning of the system in the Kongo case, Ekholm moves on to raise the

question of what takes place if prestige-goods are introduced from a new

source. This supposes a situation in which some external agent has an

interest in what can be obtained in exchange for valuables, which may

themselves be novelties (such as manufactured western articles) or may

replicate prestige-goods with an established value in the area. If, in either

case, the new supply is monopolized by the group which already has the

status of a centralizing power in the region, then an initial effect will be that

their former external exchange partners will either be excluded or fall into a

subordinate position (Ekholm 1977: 130-1). Thus where a central group A

traded with B and succeeded in dominating c, d, and e on the basis of

exchange monopoly, the novel access to certain goods enjoyed by A will tend

to reduce B to the status of the other groups. This is at least what happened

in the Kongo case. However, there may often be no reason for the foreign

merchant to favour one group within the particular peripheral region, and

such factors as uneven exchange rates may favour an array of contacts. If this

takes place, the position of A is likely to break down as formerly subordinate

groups acquire independent access to valuables. The same dynamic may well

take place under various circumstances in the absence of western trade

involvement. In the Kongo case, the first phase, of the kingdom's externally

stimulated expansion, was relatively brief: but during the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries a long 'devolutionary' process took place, the outcome

of which was extreme political fragmentation (ibid).

This argument is specific to the Kongo case, and Ekholm does not attempt

to map out other possible developments under different circumstances.

However, it might be noted that if extensive contacts took place between

European traders and peripheral parts of the prestige-goods system, it is

likely that the initial phase of political expansion would not take place, unless

the central power had some basis for control beyond trade monopoly. If

political or military factors facilitated more secure dominance, it is possible

that monopoly and the larger polity might have been sustained for much

longer. These divergent outcomes would not be the products of unsystematic

contingencies, but would rather reflect properties of slightly distinct systems.

In this model, an event such as an altered tribute presentation or a war about

sovereignty is not simply a happening in a bewildering sequence of

happenings, but instead is read as an expression or instantiation of systemic

97

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

transformation. This view, of course, has implications for methods of

research, since the 'contingencies' left aside in other anthropological

perspectives assume this distinct importance.

In the context of his discussion of the contacts between eastern and

western Polynesia, Friedman alluded in passing to the relevance of this line

of argument to the Oceanic case:

In West Polynesia, Europeans encounter a Tongan society without arms or fortified

settlements as in East Polynesia. Here, the relatively peaceful Tongan hegemony

immediately disintegrates into civil war as the result of European trade. This is the

kind of disintegration that Ekholm has shown to be systematic in the contact between

hierarchical prestige-good systems and decentralized commercial trade ... In East

Polynesia, on the other hand, the differential trade in arms and the establishment of

alliances with particular chiefs, leads to Western-backed state formation.

(1981: 289-90)

It is in fact the case that the Tongan polity was stable until just after a

sequence of visits by Cook, Bougainville and others, but the link between

European contact and unprecedented aristocratic conflict is by no means

clear. It should be noted that there is much more of a contrast between the

Tongan and Kongo cases of collapse than Friedman acknowledges, since

although the Tongan hierarchy was ultimately reshaped, its initial breakdown

was extraordinarily rapid. It would have to be supposed that a few explorers'

visits, which did distribute objects to be partly assimilated into existing

categories of valuables, but which certainly conducted no large-scale trade,

had the same effect as decades of systematic commercial exchange in the

African case. This view would be supported by the fact that the visits of the

explorers were distributed around the Tongan group, which might have

undermined monopoly, but the absence of evidence for any conflict

specifically concerned with the control of external trade is problematic.

The implication so far as eastern Polynesia is concerned is that the prior

military orientation of the so-called 'theocratic feudal' form makes great

consolidation and expansion on the basis of European support possible. The

features of some of the emergent systems in the Society Islands, the

Marquesas, and Hawaii are somewhat incompatible with a model of

straightforward expansion by conquest, and are curiously reminiscent of

features of the prestige-goods system. Chiefs were certainly preoccupied with

obtaining European weapons, and the narratives and logs of whalers, traders

and other voyagers are full of indications of the intense rivalries which

developed between chiefs with respect to European connections. If, however,

the uses made of guns are examined, it is clear that obvious military purposes

were less important than prestigious display and, most crucially, exchange

value. Chiefs who had the opportunity seem to have attempted to create

networks of dependence on the basis of their monopoly over supplies of

weapons. This was an effective short-term basis for dominance because guns,

like traditional prestige valuables, ranked higher than local produce (in the

98

Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

same sense that gold ranks higher than silver or tin), which as tribute might

be directly or indirectly exchanged for weapons and other items of European

provenance such as beads and cloth. There was thus the possibility of

generating indebtedness among subjects, at the same time as tributary

obligations were extended. The strategy could not have been sustained in the

longer term because it was not systematically linked with other bases for

social asymmetry (such as marriage alliances of the kind described by

Ekholm) and because chiefs who created indebtedness by distributing

weapons also simultaneously undermined their own security. The con-

nections between the varying nature of the indigenous systems and post-

contact histories emerge in the degree to which chiefly attempts towards

expansion were successful. The contrast between the faltering and fractured

character of polity and chiefly expansion in the Marquesas and consolidation

in Hawaii and the Society Islands clearly has much to do with the virtual

absence of centralizing tributary appropriation in the former case and the

strength of such mechanisms in the latter groups.

But as one moves later into the nineteenth century it becomes increasingly

apparent that the argument linking pre-contact systems of reproduction and

the array of colonial histories has a long way to go in the Oceanic case. There

are striking differences between the colonial histories of eastern and western

Polynesia, but if the whole of the nineteenth century is taken into account,

they are not the contrasts the prestige-goods model would predict.

Friedman's suggestion that the navigators' intrusion produced instability in

the Tongan case may turn out to be correct, but the outcome of the longer-

term process of interaction was a consolidated indigenous monarchy - in fact

the only one in the Pacific which escaped any phase of formal colonial

control (cf. Latukefu 1970).3 In both Tonga and Samoa, transformed

versions of traditional chiefly hierarchies have continued to be important

right up to the present, and the involvement of members of traditional chiefly

families in government is still notable in the whole west Polynesian region.

While the original basis for hierarchy in the control of prestige-goods may

thus have broken down at an early date, there is no comparison between this

region and a case such as Kongo, where a kingdom vanished into a mass of

localized, egalitarian societies.

In eastern Polynesia, the polities apparently based on tributary ap-

propriation and predatory military action tended to expand rapidly if

unevenly, but broke down after a few decades. Thus the systems which might

have been expected to be stronger than those based on exchange were in fact

less effective in accommodating or resisting colonial encroachment. Most

east Polynesian aristocratic structures were of much diminished significance

by the 1850s, and today - in sharp contrast with western Polynesia - it is very

difficult even to identify families with chiefly backgrounds. Such links, where

known, are socially insignificant.

99

Evolution of another sort.: regional systems theory and the Pacific

An account of these processes must, of course, incorporate variation in the

nature of colonial entanglements and intrusions. At a crude level it could be

observed that settlers and officials in eastern Polynesia actively attempted to

obtain control of land and impose administrations of some sort in place of

indigenous arrangements. This was most true of Hawaii, where the

reorganization of land (in 1848) and the expansion of the sugar industry

virtually proletarianized a substantial proportion of the indigenous Hawaiian

population (although most of the actual plantation workers were recruited

from China) (Kent 1983: 35f.). In French Polynesia there was no comparable

large-scale dispossession, but missions and officials pushed both the Tahitian

monarchs and many lesser chiefs aside. On Easter Island the impact of the

Peruvian slave raid of 1862 was so extreme that it is hardly worth mentioning

subsequent injustices before and after the Chilean annexation - although it

should be known that this sorry history is apparently soon to be compounded

by the construction of a US space shuttle base on the small island (IWGIA

1987: 31).

The appropriate contrast in the later history is between Hawaii and Fiji.

The British colonial effort in the latter case amounts to a classic instance of

indirect rule, and although this certainly had oppressive features which

neither the officials nor the various groups of complicit chiefs acknowledged,

the efforts of capitalist planters to alienate land were largely frustrated by an

administration committed to the perpetuation of Fijian rights. The

communal system persisted not so much because the government had an

enlightened recognition of how limited the benefits of development were, but

because the official promotion of more individualistic and competitive

economic practices was in general successfully resisted or passively obstructed

by Fijians (Macnaught 1982). The crucial precondition for this significant if

partial degree of autonomy was the retention of the land. Explanations must

therefore incorporate the systematic character of intrusions and their diverse

forms.

These considerations only qualify the extent to which features of post-

contact change and colonial history can be regarded as effects of the

dynamics of pre-contact systems. The question is to some extent simply one

of time-scales, since the burden of the past is altered as an immediate past

recedes. In later phases of colonial history the properties and strategies of the

colonizing system seem to overshadow those of that which is colonized. To

acknowledge this is only to recognize the profound asymmetries of

determination which give colonial and neo-colonial processes their character.

An effective model must accommodate both structured histories. The

challenge is to compound the time-scales and reveal the working-out of

structures generated in one place and time at another; to expose the

interpenetration of what might be called the recent and (to play on

ambiguity) the historic; that is, the system of contingency. The political

100

Evolution of another sort. regional systems theory and the Pacific

pertinence of this in the neo-colonial context arises from the fact that

histories of dominance, and of the origins of the problems which bedevil

administrations, are always ideologically significant: accidents and the

outcomes of structure are talked about differently, blamed, made into

precedents, and otherwise manipulated. Efforts to clarify or demystify tend

to be of value to at least some of the people involved.

101

8

Histories structured and unstructured

An abundance of recent writing suggests that the absence of history or time

has become, in contemporary anthropology, a critical lack: it is seen almost

as an injury which demands immediate attention. The work of dealing with

a formerly suppressed dimension, of rectifying an omission, or noticing a

forgotten cause, may be seen as a straightforward project, sufficient in itself.

The constitution of truth is after all seen as an arithmetic matter - a 'narrow'

perspective can only facilitate a partial vision, while the 'adding' of further

perspectives produces something fuller, a more complete appreciation. I have

already attempted to destabilize these metaphors by suggesting that some

perspectives cannot be simply 'added' to others, since their objects are

incompatible, demanding disjunct exclusions.

In this chapter I turn in another direction to scrutinize what sorts of ' time'

and 'history' might be the object of incorporation. It is obvious that there are

distinct if largely implicit concepts of time which have quite divergent

analytical implications. Consider for example Bourdieu's critique of the

structuralist understanding of gift exchange, which insists that the reality of

the act has everything to do with its temporality, with judgements of haste

or delay.

It is all a question of style, which means in this case timing and choice of occasion,

for the same act - giving, giving in return, offering one's services, paying a visit, etc.

- can have completely different meanings at different times, coming as it may at the

right or wrong moment...

(1977: 6)

The time which is asserted here is clearly the time of experience, of forseeable

futures, of memories and lived expectations. It is not the same as the longer

run which sees forms of gift-giving or larger exchange relations change. The

aim is to install time in things which might be said to happen all the time; that

is, stereotypic, described events. Such 'events' are, like institutions and

relations, part of the total set of seeming possibilities which constitute a

general image of social life. Visiting and offering one's services are perpetually

'on the cards': it is the temporal structure of card-playing which we are

drawn towards here, and it is somehow obvious that this should be the case.

102

Histories structured and unstructured

Why raise questions about the players' biographies, or the history of the

situation of play?

There are thus ways of integrating time which integrate one time-scale to

the exclusion of others,' which therefore say nothing about - for instance -

the changes arising from metropolitan intrusions in a studied place, that is,

from the historic entanglements with larger systems which make observation

possible. On the other hand, other scales, such as the longer time of

prehistoric social evolution, and the political histories of centuries, will fail

to specify experiential immediacies, the constituents of lived change. We thus

confront questions of the implications of privileging certain time-scales and

must then make judgements about the sort of talk we favour - since it is

illusory to suppose that all understandings might be condensed in some

larger, embracing framework.

Both structuralism and functionalism are oriented primarily towards

domains which are constituted as 'synchronic': what falls within the space,

or along the line, of diachrony is, as has been noted above, an unsystematic

residue, which is not exactly amenable to rigorous analysis. The sort of

approach which can break out of these terms suppresses the dichotomy by

constituting the system in (diachronic) processes. This is the potential - at

least at a theoretical level - of regional systems theory. This promise might

however underline the separation between studies of systems and studies of

change, since that perspective has dealt primarily with larger shifts in

exchange systems, with the explanation of patterns of intensification and

development, and with the erosion and consolidation of hierarchy. It has

thus had only a tangential bearing on the area of cultural analysis, which is

central to the concerns of anthropologists.

Structures in time

The attempt to integrate history and the analysis of cultural structures in the

recent work of Marshall Sahlins is therefore of considerable interest here.

This is so specifically because Sahlins moves from the mere observation that

cultural notions and structures are enacted, and therefore exist in time and

practice, to the point that action in the world is often at odds with

expectations and received categories. A cultural system generates action and

orders events, but cannot entirely encompass what takes place. This

discrepancy is the source of cultural revaluation and shifts in meanings. This

is meant to be true whether one is speaking of the 'dialectic of sense and

reference' in the routine existences of social beings anywhere, or of the

profound and apparently abrupt changes which mark the encounters

between the West and various non-western Others. The arguments depend

particularly on a history which has been mythologized as much by Europeans

as by Polynesians - the events associated with Cook's visit and death in

103

Histories structured and unstructured

Hawaii in 1778-79. The analysis is significant also because it considers

changes which took place in the earliest phases of contact between an

indigenous people and Europeans, which has implications for any attempts

to 'reconstruct' pre-contact societies and cultures.

It is well known that tribal peoples who have had limited contact with

whites or outsiders frequently believe initially that Europeans are returned

ancestors or gods. Anthropologists generally have little to say about such

constructions, perhaps simply because the ideas involved seem uncomplicated

or uninteresting, but perhaps also because the relativist impulse is to

downplay confusions which seem to bring out the credulity of people whose

modes of thought we wish to depict as different but no less rational than our

own. Yet it would be surprising if a concrete identification between an

ancestor and a living intruder did not lead to some reformation of ideas

about what ancestors are - a question which of course might be at the heart

of an investigation of 'traditional' religion.

The Hawaiians' identification of Captain Cook with their god Lono

amounts to a special example of this broader phenomenon, deriving its

significance partly from the fact that both the stranger populations and the

Hawaiian pantheon were hierarchically differentiated. One can envisage that

under these circumstances it is possible for the highest-ranking stranger to be

recognized as a supreme deity, who presumably embodies crucial powers.

The case reveals that if a white foreigner is treated as a particular god, rather

than simply as some divine being, then the cultural categories which relate

that god to others and to effects in the world, must change. And since

cosmologies are not composed of discrete equations, the ramifications of one

conceptual shift necessarily affect other sets of signs.

One of the premises of Sahlins' study is effectively that we do not initially

know who Cook was. Facts such as his date and place of birth, his training,

and the indisputably impressive list of the places he charted constitute the

biographical knowledge that schoolchildren in Australia and New Zealand

are somehow thought to need, but this sequence of located achievements

adding up to a heroic career was obviously not the Hawaiians' Cook.

Sahlins' attempt to know Cook proceeds by way of a sketch of the figures

and agents of Hawaiian political cosmology.

There was a fundamental opposition between a usurping warrior chiefship

and a generative, indigenous sponsor of agricultural fertility and general

well-being. The former was identified with Ku, the god of war, and a large

number of particular gods conceived as species or bodies of Ku, and was

reflected in myths of invading chiefs from distant lands who killed or expelled

local chiefs and priests and who instituted a new religion in which human

sacrifice figured prominently. Ku was closely associated with the Hawaiian

kings, but was displaced over a four-month period of regenerative winter

rain, when the image of Lono toured the island, receiving offerings and

104

Histories structured and unstructured

giving new life to gardens. During this annual Makahiki festival it was as

though the order prior to usurpation regained ascendancy: all the ceremonies

associated with Ku were suspended, and the king was secluded. As the period

ended, Lono was displaced and the king incorporated or appropriated his

powers. The antagonism between the.two was manifested in a sham battle at

a late stage in the annual ritual (1981: 10-17; cf. 1985b: 206f.; Valeri 1985).

All this is significant because, in Sahlins' version, the pervasive mode in

Polynesian thought was recapitulation: the definite struggles between chiefs

in traditional history are prefigured in more abstract cosmological

oppositions, while the legends themselves generate the understanding and

acts of nineteenth-century personae. Biography thus reproduces myth and

cosmology. While the Polynesians constructed their own identities in these

terms, more or less unwitting foreigners tended to get caught up in this

scheme also. There was a sort of logic of assimilation of persons just as there

was with things: European hatchets and alcohol were incorporated into

indigenous categories of objects, and thus carried the meanings and potential

uses of prior classes of things (cf. Thomas n.d.1; Bare 1985: 178-9).

It might be thought that Cook's foreignness would make an identification

with Ku-type gods likely, and the suggestion that he was offered and

accepted indigenous women would have marked this sort of usurpation.

However, the timing of his visit, and his circuit of the island, fitted all too

neatly with the Makahiki circuit of the Lono image, and he was identified

with that god. Cook was addressed as Lono, and was prepared to go through

various ceremonies and receive offerings. The coincidences were compounded

when Cook's ships left at about the right time, the officers reassuring the

Hawaiian priests that they would return the following year. In asserting that

Cook was a myth before he was an event, Sahlins thus identifies Cook as

a particular, novel form of the deity. By leaving at the appropriate time, he

submitted to the authority of the ruling chief in the same way as Lono's

powers were annually subordinated. While this was consistent with the

traditional Hawaiian scheme, Cook's ship came back far too soon: one of the

masts was damaged, and the expedition returned only days after leaving.

Cook as Lono now posed a more definite threat to the regime of Ku and the

ruling chief. Relations with the Hawaiians deteriorated, and there was a

number of incidents of theft and violence, culminating, of course, in Cook's

death on 14 January 1779. Although this was not premeditated, it was

consistent with the Hawaiian scheme: Lono was vanquished and his mana

incorporated by the victor. Britishness in names and things subsequently

became a key symbol of the incorporation of this foreign power among the

Hawaiian chiefs. The emphasis here is on the recapitulation of structure, of

novel content in reproduced forms.

An important feature of Sahlins' argument is, however, the subsequent

transformation of Hawaiian categories through their encounter with new

105

Histories structured and unstructured

events and situations. In the decades following Cook's death, trading

relations between Hawaiians and Europeans intensified, meeting a European

demand for sandalwood and provisions, and Hawaiian demands for iron,

fabric, beads, axes, guns, and many other things. Hawaiian chiefs sought to

control the movements of these prestigious things through extensions of the

kapu (the Hawaiian form of tapu) system, inventing various restrictions to

facilitate monopoly, but thereby altering the meanings of kapu. On the other

hand, the involvement of sailors with common women made it possible for

the women to violate kapu such as those connected with eating meat, or

eating with men, which their common menfolk were complicit in because

they wanted the objects received in exchange for sexual services. Thus while

the primary categorical opposition in pre-European Hawaiian culture was

between male and female, which roughly accorded with kapu/non-kapu,

trade created a novel solidarity between common men and women, and a

deeper opposition between them and chiefs. These propositions might be

disputed, but the general point is clear - that the conjunction of structure

and practice brings about a revaluation and reordering of categories.

In Historical metaphors as well as in the article 'Structure and history' (in

Sahlins 1985a) the general theoretical propositions are stressed. Action takes

place in terms of received categories and structures are thereby reproduced.

On the other hand, since situations do not necessarily reflect categories,

structures may be reordered or transformed in the course of reproduction.

The overall distinctions between stability and change, and structure and

event, are set up as unhelpful western constructions which obscure the

temporality of system on the one hand, and the systemic dimensions of

events on the other. The effect of these assertions is to elevate the significance

of history and events (since categories are revalued through practice) but also

to depict the subsequent encompassment of events by a cultural order.

Things in the world may be initially intransigent, but the reordering and

modification of sense (at least temporarily) incorporates reference.

In Sahlins' vision, the extent to which cultures tolerate and respond to the

necessary discrepancy between the world as constituted and the world

experienced is not uniform. He offers a rough contrast between 'prescriptive'

and 'performative' cultural structures: in the former case, the orientation is

towards conformity with type, or with established traditions: circumstances

and events are assimilated to a prevailing order, their perhaps divergent

nature being suppressed. On the other hand, 'performative orders assimilate

themselves to contingent circumstances' (1985a: xii); they thus extend

themselves, renegotiate rules, and invent political forms. They accommodate

the disjunction between structure and event which prescriptive forms resist.

The Hawaiian system - as one would expect from the analysis - exemplifies

a performative order, while Australian Aborigines and apparently also the

Maori represent the prescriptive type. In the latter case practice is so

106

Histories structured and unstructured

intimately linked with cosmological and mythological precedent that Sahlins

writes of 'mytho-praxis': 'the Maori past is a vast scheme of life-

possibilities'; 'events are hardly unique or new but are immediately perceived

in the received order of structure, as identical with their original'; 'the Maori

world unfolds as an eternal return, the recurrent manifestation of the same

experiences' (1985a: 57-9).2 We might note here that time tends to collapse

into a relationship between the ancestral and the present, the general and the

particular. Cosmology is remote and elemental, genealogical myth more

recent and specific. The discussion at this point thus deals with time as a

distancing element in a cultural structure, rather than a dimension and

constituent of more immediate social life.

We might be more concerned by the fact that the process of transformation

seems to have got lost hereabouts. Sahlins suggests that prescriptive and

performative orders are 'differentially "open" to history' (1985a: xii) but a

reader might be forgiven for taking the latter as open and the former as

essentially closed. Sahlins acknowledges the connections between this pair of

terms and Levi-Strauss's somewhat notorious opposition between 'hot' and

'cold' societies (L6vi-Strauss 1966: 233-4). Since L6vi-Strauss's observation

was strictly about a cultural order rather than any facts of actual change, it

can be defended against the charge that history is being denied. But because

Sahlins' structuralism might itself be said to be performative, having

ostensibly extended itself to incorporate history, the nature of change in these

systems would have to be addressed in a more serious way. Despite the fact

that Sahlins' theory is partly an account of change, the implication is

curiously that prescriptive categories endlessly resist revaluation, events

continuing to be received in terms of a prior scheme, even the same prior

scheme. It is hard to see how consequential change can occur at all under

such a rigorous regime of cultural reproduction. Yet of course we know from

archaeology that major transformations in subsistence, settlement patterns,

and probably also political organization, did take place in the prehistories of

Australia and New Zealand.

The problem stated in these terms is perhaps only acute if Sahlins' concept

of the prescriptive system is adopted in an extreme form. But a more

significant difficulty of the same kind arises if other aspects of his histories are

considered.

What another kind of epistemology might have called the 'test case' for

the theory is, of course, that of the Hawaiians' Cook. Here, as Friedman

(1985:191) has noted, the events which structure fails to encompass are those

arising from external contact rather than internal transformation. The

specific aspects of these circumstances mean that there is a definite source for

radical change which is highly restricted and localized, in the sense that the

crucial events were all connected more or less directly with the presence of

Cook's ships and the interaction of himself and his men with the Hawaiians.

107

Histories structured and unstructured

While Sahlins claims that a case of this kind simply brings out processes

which are far more general (1981: vii) it is notable that more typical,

primarily internal change would entail a dialectic which is both more general

and less marked. The conflict between cultural sense and experiential

references would be at once more piecemeal and more gradual. What is

singular about something like the confrontation between Hawaiians and

Englishmen is the source of difference between system and events - because

we are offered a Hawaiian system and foreigners' acts (which nevertheless

become Hawaiian events). This fertile difference is something quite other

than 'the shadow' which routinely falls between 'the idea and the reality' (as

in T. S. Eliot's ' The hollow men').

Every relationship subsists in physical or mental acts: assertions,

transactions, perceptions, reflections. The moment of instantiation is

necessarily, in some minimal sense, a moment of transformation. Every

interaction between a couple of friends both newly produces their

relationship and redefines it in some way, just as any workers' strike must

reproduce class relations while giving them a new meaning. To emphasize the

'indissoluble synthesis' of system and event (Sahlins 1985a: 156) is to stress

a profound truth about the dimensions of experience, but it may be mistaken

to regard this as the basis of a useful theory of social, cultural or historical

change. The problem is that the observation that change is inherent in

enactment leads to a theory of history in which there is no source for change

apart from the discrepancy between sense and reference.' This has spectacular

generative potential in the Hawaiian case because the gap between categories

and happenings in what might be called the inter-enactment of structures is

so considerable. It might also be noted that the particular force of the larger

argument derives from the dominant metaphors of recapitulation and

genealogy in Polynesian culture: the theory is, as it were, made for the case

study. Although experience is frequently modelled in some sense upon

narrative, the argument can only be made in a stronger form where this is an

explicit process.

In more typical cases the 'indissoluble synthesis' of reproduction and

change would assume an almost mechanistic character, as in Bourdieu's

formulation of the circular relations between agents' dispositions, strategies

and the habitus (1977: 78 and passim). In general, transformation would be

necessary, but minimal: the 'theory' provides no warrant for any sort of

social change which differs fundamentally from the sort of gradual linguistic

change that takes place through usage - unless one is dealing with particular

and dramatic situations of confrontation. A system or cultural structure may

therefore necessarily entail change without thereby having a dynamic; it may

even have a 'history' (in some narrow sense) without being characterized by

any kind of structural transformation or evolution.

This accounts for the fact that the 'events' which the Hawaiian system is

108

Histories structured and unstructured

shown to deal with are generated by an external system. These events do not

themselves amount to any kind of structured history. In so far as the

Hawaiian order itself is considered, the old anthropological opposition

between a coherent system of some sort, and a disconnected stream of events,

is in fact reproduced. The analysis is novel in its depiction of the revaluation

of categories arising from these events, but does not depict events and

transformations generated within the system itself. We thus have no vision of

what change in Hawaii before contact would have been like, beyond limited

incremental difference arising through enactment and revaluation. The

indigenous system is only historicized in its dealings with Europeans; there

is no basis in this historical structuralism for theories of indigenous change

or of the major transformations which made Hawaiian, Tahitian and western

Polynesian societies into systems which look quite different. The problem is

more acute in the Maori case, since the prescriptive form is supposed to

constrain even this minimal incremental change.

An objective of any serious theory in social or cultural analysis must

presumably be to account for the distinctiveness of particular cases.

Although many problems arise in the analysis of the positional significance

of local meanings, in determining the form of social relations and dynamics,

the intellectual endeavour should not be limited to such concerns. The

structuralist analysis of history says something about how schemes of

meaning incorporate events and thus takes into account the origins of some

elements of the system, but does not go very far in this direction. There is

essentially no attempt to deal with longer-term structural transformations,

although these are the processes which differentiated the Polynesian societies

in the first place. The analysis of history developed by Sahlins and some of

his associates is thus a very limited theory, which says nothing about the

historical processes which actually make the conditions of life and culture

variable across time and space. If analysis is to effectively embrace this wider

range of questions, the interpretation of archaeological evidence needs to be

linked much more directly with social and historical analysis.

Metaphors in time or temporal metaphors? Sahlins' implicit evolutionism

The grounds for this objection become more substantial if Sahlins'

comparison of Hawaiian and Maori culture (1985b) is examined. The

argument starts with the point that both groups shared a common central

Polynesian cosmology, of which the crucial notion was perhaps that while

gods are the sources of life, they do not automatically or willingly facilitate

or comply with human needs: 'men are compelled to secure their own

existence by inflicting a defeat upon the god, appropriating thus the female

power - the bearing earth' (1985b: 197). The thesis is that what is generalized

and humanized in the Maori case is 'transposed to the register of kingship'

109

Histories structured and unstructured

in Hawaii (ibid: 196). In the Maori case, divine power is generally

appropriated: agricultural fertility ritual is a matter in which everyone

participates, re-enacting the conflict between the deities Tu (identified with

man) and Rongo (the ancestor of crops). In the Hawaiian case, Ku is

identified with the king, who is opposed to, and alternates with, Lono: in the

course of the annual Makahiki fertility ritual mentioned above, the god

regenerates the land, but is then displaced and defeated by the king. Thus

everything happens as it the agricultural rites of the Maori hapu [local group] were

expanded in the Hawaiian Makahiki to the totality of society and the generality of the

universe. The cosmological exaggeration is corollary to the hierarchical trans-

formation, to the incarnation of the human species in the king. (ibid: 210)

This argument leads to a number of intriguing contrasts, but some of the

underlying ideas are deeply problematic. At one level, the description simply

exposes a series of differences, either case being represented as a 'version' of

the other (e.g. 203, 205-6). However, it is also made quite clear that these

contrasts are to be correlated with 'the transformation to divine kingship'

(216). There is thus a strong implication that the Maori case is a sort of initial

state, which Hawaiian society and culture have developed from. What

animates the argument is not simply a pattern of similarity and difference,

but connection, movement and inversion: what intrigues us about human

sacrifice in Hawaii is not, in this case, its internal features, but the fact that

it figures at one point in the shift from a metonymic man-god relation in the

Maori case - warriors act as gods and reproduce divine struggles in

cannibalistic warfare - to the 'metaphoric submissions and associations'

(215) of the king's sacrifice. This from-to argument draws much of its

salience from the assertion that a certain process of social transformation

took place, but there is no interest in describing or specifying this process.

Despite the emphasis on the connections between structure and change in

other areas of Sahlins' work, the links break down in this case: there is no

suggestion that particular patterns of change are associated with either form,

and any process of transition or evolution is reduced to something which

links the types but is basically external to the systemic properties in either

case. We thus have an implied position close to the neo-evolutionist analysis

of various 'stages' in social development which in fact said very little about

transformations between essentially discrete forms.

In the constitution of Maori society as the initial or early form we

encounter the same more specific problems as were identified in Goldman's

argument. No anthropologist would make an explicit claim that Maori

society remained static between some early date when the Hawaiians went off

in their own innovative direction and the time of encounters with Cook and

other early voyagers. But a claim of precisely this kind is entailed in

Goldman's and Sahlins' arguments. Such a view might have a minimal

110

Histories structured and unstructured

degree of plausibility if the Hawaiian population could be viewed as a

branching-off from the Maori, but the prehistory is more complicated (cf.

Kirch 1986). Despite the indisputable fact of common origin, the colonizing

Maori groups came from the ancestral east Polynesian population at a

different time, and, presumably, under different conditions. These questions

are in any case secondary if processes of local development and divergence

in New Zealand are acknowledged, but such a history is inadmissible if the

relationship Sahlins postulates between the Maori and Hawaiian cases is to

be sustained.

Structural creativity and individual agency: actors and victims in history

One of the dominant themes in Pacific history since the 1950s has been the

agency of islanders. Contrary to the crude images in popular accounts such

as Moorehead's Fatal impact (1968) of foreigners and particularly missions

rapidly and savagely disrupting indigenous cultures, it has been stressed that

islanders were never passive dupes or simple victims of Europeans. In this

context the evidence for the active manipulation of settlers and missionaries

by islanders toward their own ends has been emphasized, as have various

internal rationales for participation in relations and transactions which

appear exploitative from a western perspective (Davidson 1955; Howe 1984).

This theme is of much wider significance, and the question of the extent to

which oppressed groups within societies, and in a variety of colonial

contexts, have been victims overwhelmed by superior force and circum-

stances, or actors who played a part in creating their own situation, has been

often raised (e.g. Thompson 1963).

With respect to contacts and relations on colonial peripheries, such

arguments postulate a certain intransigence on the part of a local culture:

outsiders' offerings or demands are accepted in so far as they accord with a

prior scheme of aims and strategies. The arguments of Sahlins develop a

complementary theme in stressing the creative dynamics of the indigenous

cultural scheme. Cultural items, stray things such as names and new objects,

are incorporated into an uncompromised order, just as new channels

entailing guns or ship-travel come to facilitate old ends. The treatment of

Cook as a god reflected symbolic appropriation rather than submission, just

as the celebrated aristocratic rejection of the kapu system in 1819 reflected

earlier moments of political and religious transformation, rather than the

abandonment of Hawaiian culture for Christianity. The acquisition of

alcohol as 'British kava' similarly arose from the incorporation of

Europeanness as a distinct Tahitian political symbol, rather than some

corrosive process of 'acculturation' (cf. Thomas n.d.1).

Neither the historians nor Sahlins have acknowledged that these resistant

elaborations of local culture entail a particular power relation which could

111

Histories structured and unstructured

exist only at a certain phase of colonial history, namely the period between

initial contact and the establishment of formal metropolitan rule or some

form of disruptive occupation. The projection of European power was

restrained by lack of interest and constrained by a degree of resistance which

tended to be overriden in later phases. The demands of European shipping

- which mostly had the means to overcome certain forms of indigenous

resistance - were generally limited to what could be obtained through

exchange on the periphery of local societies. Certain traders sought

commodities such as sandalwood, beche-de-mer, pearls and pork; many

visitors simply wanted fresh water and provisions. In neither case was it

significant how these goods were obtained: the demands were not linked with

any interest in owning land, controlling resources, organizing labour beyond

a minimal and temporary degree, or otherwise interfering in internal

relations. Attempts were generally made by navigators to determine the

forms and terms of barter, but these were often not accepted by islanders,

who frequently refused to participate if dissatisfied with what was offered in

return for their goods. Although some of these visitors expressed their

disapproval of local warfare or such customs as infanticide to the chiefs with

whom they dealt, there was no serious effort to alter the indigenous order.

Like the north American fur trade, this interaction had all sorts of

ramifications, and tended to generate internal dependence on external

exchange, but left the indigenous people with a great deal of autonomy.

Missionaries, on the other hand, had the desire but not generally the

capacity to restructure indigenous societies. Although many would perhaps

have found the notion of displacing chiefs and assuming authority themselves

agreeable, and would have had few reservations about imposing a novel

social order, this in fact took place on very few occasions (although some

missionaries were certainly politically influential). Particularly in earlier

phases, missionaries were frequently isolated, relatively impoverished, and

were not visibly supported by impressive outside forces. So far from being in

a position to disrupt beliefs or proscribe customs, they sometimes had

difficulty in obtaining provisions and minimal co-operation. In some later

cases, legal codes drawn up by missionaries were adopted in native polities,

but these reflect the expansion of certain chiefs' power in the guise of

evangelism, rather than the overriding effectiveness of missionary in-

tervention.

Connections with foreigners were thus locally manipulated and willingly

reproduced, rather than imposed. There was space under these circumstances

for precisely the sorts of innovative meanings discussed by Sahlins. Since

foreign links actually tended to be positively valued, the logic of meanings

was extended to encompass and in some sense appropriate selected aspects

of what was foreign.

112

Histories structured and unstructured

The properties of a formal colonial situation in which administrative rule

is asserted, or one in which intruders dispossess natives for land or labour,

are of course very different. It is one thing to speak of a performative culture

order which assimilates itself to contingencies, and quite another for a people

to find their leaders powerless, themselves landless, and their crucial ritual

practices proscribed. Such people will find the 'working misunderstandings'

which sometimes operate so creatively in the inter-enactment of cultural

structure do not in fact work. The sort of 'assimilation' Sahlins describes in

the Hawaiian case is not as radical as his theoretical discussion would

suggest, since cultural forms adapt themselves to novel content. An

unexamined power situation is supposed in which agents sustain a set of

concerns and objectives not primarily dictated by external influence. A

different power situation will displace agents; the salience of the cultural

structure which specifies their positional values will evaporate; some other

logic must emerge which expresses the novel situation; cultural change will

lack the continuity which can be discerned if, at some level, it is terms in a

structure which change, rather than a structure's conditions of existence. It

is tedious to observe that there is always persistence and change, but the

differences in degree do entail types of transformation which are qualitatively

distinct.

This is not to say that indigenous cultures are in some simple sense

'destroyed' and replaced by introduced categories, since even in contexts

where metropolitan languages have been imposed, where everything seems

remote from any traditional past, fundamental notions of personhood and

agency are often found which have little to do with those of the dominant

culture. But the mechanisms in these cases are quite different: sometimes the

dominated people half-adopt the colonizers' representations, even if they

invert them and positively assert whatever the dominant culture denigrates.

Thus, in what have become 'traditional' communities in parts of modern

Hawaii, the virtues of gift-giving, reciprocity and egalitarianism in interaction

are stressed, not because such practices really reflect anything that has

persisted since former times, but precisely because sharing and parity reverse

the rules of the external monetized world, in which such communities are

poor and marginal (Linnekin 1984). Sharing and reciprocity have often

merely been regarded as typical features of simpler societies, and it has not

been noted that what is crucial is often a behavioural ethic which exists in the

absence of actual equity and redistribution. It is revealing that in New

Guinea it is common for this type of egalitarian sharing to be referred to by

a pidgin term, wanwan (one-one, to give equally to each); this implies that the

ethic derives from such contexts as plantations, where the fraternal solidarity

of indigenous workers is asserted against inequality in their external relations

with managers (and others such as traders) (Thomas n.d.2). It can be argued

113

Histories structured and unstructured

that this type of oppositional cultural expression is very widespread in both

colonial and non-colonial situations (cf. Beckett 1987: 92, 108-9, passim);

that, for instance, many of the singular features of hunter-gatherer societies

derive not from pristine simplicity but rather from the facts of their

'encapsulation' by threatening and potentially dominant groups dependent

on other forms of production. In these situations, historical relations must be

constitutive rather than contingent in both the cultural account of local

meanings and in any adequate description of social relations.

The Cook/Lono case is thus only a model for a certain class of historical

changes. Such processes perhaps took place more in the Pacific than on

colonized continents, because the insular nature of Pacific societies provided

some defence against disruption, and gave greater space to indigenous

manipulation of relatively manageable colonial intrusions. In these cases it

can justly be claimed that we see the local incorporation of a constituted

'world system' rather than the integration and subordination of the locality

in the global economy. But there came a time in each place - perhaps in a few

places it is still to come - when these incursions ceased to be manageable. The

histories subsequent to that time cannot be seen in terms of the increments

and extensions of an indigenous cultural logic. The stream of outside

offerings ceases to be a matter of contingent events which internal structure

selectively receives and accommodates, and the structural aspect of what is

external itself impinges on the local system and its contingencies.

Culture in history

These critiques demand an extension of anthropological vision in two

directions: first, further back in time, into processes which generate social

variation and historical dynamics; and second, toward dealing with the array

of inter-societal processes, including those constitutive of colonial systems,

and their local effects.

Many categories in social analysis entail judgements about relative

complexity, inequality, cultural elaboration, productive capacity, and so

forth. These situate societies in implicit evolutionary terms but do not

acknowledge that processes and even sequences are imputed. The opposition

between prescriptive and performative cultural orders is another of this kind,

since it is clear enough that we find relatively 'heated' histories in the latter

case - which is to say, sequences of change and development more like our

own, and less like the repetitive time of real primitives. The contrast between

New Zealand and Hawaii implies the evolution from the former to the latter,

which we would presume to manifest a more general process.

Larger social categories are essential because certain crude classes do have

features in common, including ways of dealing or coping with metropolitan

114

Histories structured and unstructured

intrusions, but if anthropology is to amount to more than an articulation of

the ideology enacted in these instructions, the basis of such types and

transformations needs to be specified. Actual history can displace the

evolutionary narrative as the necessary chronological structure which

encompasses the variety of cases and gives them a more general meaning in

our own culture. Where there is no long documentary record, archaeological

evidence is a crucial element of this movement of explication, since it pertains

to located histories and makes a break from culturally-charged evolutionary

schema.

The difficulty is that the bearing of archaeological evidence upon social

processes, or upon the social processes which are salient in a particular

historical situation, is highly variable. Much of the evidence relates to specific

technological matters, rather than subsistence, trade, settlement changes,

political organization, and so on. Linking what can be attested to

archaeologically with what can be historically documented or ethno-

graphically observed can involve making associations between different time-

scales. The potential effects of long-term processes which have general effects

in intensive or less intensive production, in an orientation toward exchange

or warfare, must be linked with historic outcomes among groups of related

societies. Diversity at a particular time - some centuries ago, in the early

contact period, under colonialism, or in the present - can be the key to the

unfolding of short- and long-term transformations. Attempts to 'translate'

between prehistory and a new kind of socio-historical inquiry will be

problematic or not, depending on whether existing work is compatible with

such objectives. In the Pacific, there has always been some co-operation

between anthropologists, prehistorians and historians, and there is thus a

basis for more integrated projects.

An essential component of any more broadly based investigation is the

colonial process. This has a bearing which has mostly been unrecognized

upon the terrain of symbolic and interpretive anthropology. The reactive,

oppositional character of certain prominent cultural processes simply cannot

be understood unless there is some appreciation of wider relations and of the

histories through which particular asymmetries arise. This may seem

uncontentious, but the fact is that the numerous shifts in the anthropological

perspective have preserved the basic idea that what is studied is a system at

a particular time. The importance of the colonial context has, of course, been

stressed by various writers (e.g. Worsley 1957; Asad 1973), but the effect of

this insight has been limited, because the interdependence of theory,

methods, and the larger orientation of anthropological discourse has not

been recognized. Some theoretical perspectives have emphasized certain

kinds of time, but have not often effectively integrated ethnographic facts

and colonial histories: the system may now be seen as open or permeable, but

115

Histories structured and unstructured

it is possible to acknowledge external influences of various kinds without

recognizing the depths of externally-generated internal transformation. The

redefinition of anthropological interests, the development of an extended

anthropological practice, the reconstitution of history, and the critique of

evolution, are exercises which seem to operate at different levels, but which

should be mutually implicated in an effort to transform this sort of

intellectual practice.

116

9

The look of events

In some sense happenings are always at once outcomes, expressions and

intrusions, but different frames of knowing render them unevenly across

these terms. If history is seen as a 'concatenation of discrete and transitory

entities or events, each unique in its particulars' (Ingold 1986: 74-5), events

stand as outcomes of contingent causes in an immediate sense but have an

unpredictable and somewhat arbitrary character when viewed from a

distance. Things of great consequence may take place for trivial and

adventitious reasons, as the nursery rhyme insists:

For want of a nail

The shoe was lost,

For want of a shoe

The horse was lost,

For want of a horse

The rider was lost,

For want of a rider

The battle was lost,

For want of a battle

The kingdom was lost,

And all for the want

Of a horse shoe nail.

Hence the profound distrust among historians of the more conventional,

uncompromisingly empiricist, kind for any sort of deterministic model like

the Marxian scheme. Even explanations of a much lower order encounter the

suspicious attitude of pathological caution, the fearful circumspection so

mindful of the plurality of causes and the multiplicity of aspects. Connections

between a happening and some set of generative factors may be

acknowledged, but these would not be charged with a systematic character,

and would tend to be very much overshadowed by the force of the event

itself. The master scheme of narrative is thus constituted through singular

effect, rather than through process. Temporal flow might seem to have no

structure, although readers of history encounter narrative tropes and forms

again and again: careers develop, nations are built, empires decline.

In sociology or anthropology it is different. Codes of meaning or arrays of

117

The look of events

behavioural rules are not immediately 'caused'. They are expressive in a

circular way, or functional and mutually determining. If events are discussed

at all, they lack the singular character of the historical deed or accident. In

the notion of a speech act or in some other cultural enactment we find the

event much reduced in relation to the generative scheme. What takes place

has no life as an intrusion with a loose and partly unfixed causality, but is

rather the expression of a structure, the manifestation of a cultural order or

a set of notions about behaviour.

Hence the stereotypic form which events usually take in anthropological

monographs which have as their essential objects the form or order of a

system. We are told that when a father dies, the son must initiate certain

ceremonies, and so on; this is the generalized and abstracted rendering of an

event which may also be offered in an apparently more immediate guise - a

specific case, with located and named persons. But the function of this

specificity is generally validation rather than information - just as urban

legends are authenticated through spurious detail. This is so because the

names of people or their clans do not mean anything unless there is a serious

account of lived context, of village histories, micropolitics, squabbles and

biographies. This dimension of particularity and narrative is found in some

better ethnographies, but is generally submerged because of the tension

which arises with projects toward an order and coherence. Events or cases

stripped of context thus carry only the weight of instances and exempli-

fications.

The difficulties that one might have in the abstract with this discourse are

immeasurably sharpened by the fact that we speak of a colonized world, and

one in which post-colonial states have not ceased to intervene in the lives of

tribal and dependent populations within their borders. (Since the west

acknowledges and celebrates the 'heated' character of its own history, there

is no need to assert that here.) There is thus a gulf between theories of events

or history which render change as the other side of the coin of stereotypic

reproduction or enactment and the circumstances of the ethnographic world

the discourse claims to be about. Fabian has pointed out that anthropology

creates a false temporal distance between anthropological knowers and

contemporary others who are in fact our coevals (1983). This removal of

(paradigmatically) tribal Others to another time has, of course, larger

ideological dimensions. A convergent political blindness arises from the

exclusions I have concentrated upon: when lives are shot through by the

savage changes and novel inequalities arising directly or indirectly from the

conjunction of local and global dynamics, it seems something of an absurdity

that anthropology should continue to privilege the anti-temporal field of

relations, frame of meanings, or cultural logic which bestows positional

values on the orderly march of people and their thoughts and doings.

Detective stories of the conventional puzzle kind occasion a different line

118

The look of events

of thought about events. The murder itself is initially a paradigmatically

intrusive event: it comes as a shock to people and a threat to a regulated and

comfortable bourgeois existence. Nothing could stand in a more problematic

relation to categories and understandings. Except that, as the detective

proceeds, it becomes apparent that the tidy community had a life at odds

with its self-depiction: a forest of motives, resentments, and grounds for

suspicion develops. This amounts not merely to the disclosure of context

which makes the event explicable, but an overpowering super-contextual-

ization which makes the act of murder a logical outcome of every suspect's

grievances and opportunities. If one sets aside the fact that things are never

the same again, the event collapses into the enactment of context, the

consequence of relations and perceptions (and this is in fact the sort of

solution offered in Bradd Shore's 'Samoan mystery' (1982) to a murder in

the ethnographic field). This surfeit of motive, this permeating abundance of

sense and causality, is the condition which anthropological discourse sets up.

This not only drowns particulars, but defeats the attempt to delineate causes

and reasons, since in their multiplicity they overlap and overdetermine. What

the detective does is different, and entails diminishing much of the context,

since one gathers, as the logic of the problem is exposed, that certain

circumstances were less consequential than others, that points of apparent

importance recede, that accusations lacked the grounding they appeared to

possess at the time. Sometimes the heart of the matter lies in the distant past

and sometimes elsewhere - in Conan Doyle it emerges from colonized places

like India and, ironically, the Andaman Islands; events are thus traced to a

deeper logic, whose longer-term dynamics are determinant rather than

inescapably plural.

Conclusions

Renewed interest in the history of our discipline and disciplined inquiry into the

history of confrontation between anthropology and its Other are therefore not

escapes from empiry; they are practical and realistic. They are ways to meet the Other

on the same ground, in the same Time. Johannes Fabian, Time and the other

The central points of the arguments I have worked through can be distilled

as follows. In an effort to present these as plainly as possible, I leave behind

the many qualifications and footnotes of the preceding discussions.

1. It must be acknowledged that anthropoloy, like other specialist

discourses, operates through practice like culture in general, and is therefore

governed by something other than rationalist expectations. Practitioners of

the discipline may aspire to be scientific, but models of how research should

be conducted do not adequately describe it as it is conducted. Prescriptive

epistemology, whether of a positivist or hermeneutic kind, therefore has very

119

The look of events

little direct relevance for either the retrospective analysis of anthropological

thought or the theoretical elaboration of appropriate methods for future

research. Anthropology is a knowledge-producing practice which has taken

place, and continues to take place, in institutional and (usually) colonial

contexts. These are the contexts in which evidence is assembled; the factors

which determine theoretical orientations and methods are the same as those

which shape the form of evidence. There are no clear cut separations between

theory, methods and evidence. Data has no fixity independent of evolving

intellectual styles and quarrels. The assumptions of ethnographic descriptions

may therefore be transmitted to theoretical works which innocently take

sources to be unproblematic.

2. This epistemological stance helps one - or at least has helped me - to

distinguish effective premises and hidden agendas from the stated rationales

of anthropological texts. It permits a critique of the founding relations of

anthropological discourse.

3. The omission of history from anthropological description and analysis

is not some kind of contingent oversight but constitutes a systematic

exclusion. The exclusion of historical processes was a necessary element in

the professionalization of the discipline, and has been perpetuated because,

at the most general level, the object of study has not changed. This object was

and is essentially a social or cultural system or structure out of time.

Explanations and interpretations have depended on the coherence of

whichever elements of the system are privileged in a particular form of

analysis, rather than upon processes entailing at once the positional or

functional significance of systemic elements and their historic causality. The

number of ethnographic studies which have actually broken from this

orientation is small; substantially smaller than the number which claim some

sort of historical orientation.

4. The ahistorical approach has led to at least two kinds of problems.

First, the links between the routine functioning of a system, change, and

historical transformations, have never been effectively theorized. This has

been so because systems are relatively orderly while what lies outside them

is, by definition, unsystematic. The focus upon the coherence or reproduction

of 'culture' or 'society' out of time makes 'history' an unstructured,

incoherent residue of contingent events.'

Second, there are many specific misinterpretations which treat particular

social or cultural phenomena in terms of their positional, systemic value,

when they manifestly derive from more or less recent historical change.

Leaving aside the erroneous assumption that the indigenous culture has

remained unchanged or developed autonomously for a long period, such

interpretations are not always wrong, because of course events do acquire

120

The look of events

social and cultural significance. However, the account must always be partial

and misleading in so far as systematic logic is taken as a sufficient

explanation.

5. (a) The exclusion of history and disciplinary professionalization have

also resulted in the exclusion of the ethnographic writings of those other than

professional anthropologists. The bases for this generalized exclusion are

highly questionable. The quality of missionary descriptions, for instance, is

very uneven, but the properties of the descriptive discourse and the

familiarity with indigenous peoples upon which statements were typically

based encourage one to place these texts, as a general category, on the same

level as those of professionals. Judgements about the worth of particular

texts can only be made on a case-by-case basis, and depend as much on the

project of the reader as the intrinsic features of the text.

(b) Historical documents which are not ethnographic descriptions are

often vitally important in an entirely different way. They provide the basis for

a knowledge of the events which have had an impact upon the groups being

studied; many tribal ethnographies have ignored these processes which other

studies have shown to have had crucial ramifications for the system being

considered. Texts which are thus worthless in ethnographic terms cannot be

overlooked unless historical causality is denied. The theoretical obstacles and

difficulties are confounded by practical factors, because most anthropologists

lack historical training, are unaware of what kinds of sources exist, how they

need to be pursued, and how they must be contextualized and evaluated.

Taking a few rich sources out of context and using these as a quarry for

ethnographic data does not amount to practising historical research.

6. A consequence of point 4 has been that various attempts to incorporate

time or history into anthropology have been unsuccessful because the

anthropological object has not been reformulated. Discussions such as

Bourdieu's and Sahlins' can therefore deal with some time-scales, and with

representations of history, but cannot effectively integrate real history. These

attempts retain the central notion of system or structure but insist on its

grounding in time. This grounding cannot effectively incorporate real history

unless 'system' is displaced by 'systemic process' as the object of analysis.

7. The notion of history as a systemic process is circuitously derived from

social evolutionary theory but breaks from it in several crucial ways. Notions

of 'stages' and 'direction' are displaced by transformations which, in

regional contexts, are not directional. The standard evolutionary logic of

taking one contemporary society as the primitive form of another is totally

fallacious. The substitute for what has been justly derided as conjectural

history can be based upon ordinary historical analysis (where sources are

available), archaeology, and sometimes other techniques such as linguistic

121

The look of events

reconstruction. These methods always involve some speculation, and, in

some cases, can only furnish a general and coarse-grained image. The

question of their plausibility and value can only be established in particular

regional contexts. It is manifest in the Pacific.

8. A consequence of point 5 (b) for the view of history as a systemic

process is a breakdown of the division which has generally been sustained in

anthropology between the coherence of traditional systems and the

haphazard and disruptive course of subsequent history. Interpretations of

the latter have generally been much weaker than those of the former.

Satisfactory analysis would depend on treating, for example, metropolitan

intrusions into tribal territory as a structured process like that of the

indigenous system, and it would be unwise to pretend that such analysis

would be easy. However, this is an especially important area for investigation,

because it bears more directly upon contemporary tribal and third-world

problems than many issues which are currently more central to an-

thropological discussion. This is not to say that some inquiries which are

completely detached from this neo-colonial context are not worthwhile -

since some bear indirectly on such problems anyway - but that it is

inappropriate for the discipline to retain a focus which actually marginalizes

such politically salient interests.

9. Many anthropological discussions which apparently have nothing in

common with older forms of evolutionary discourse and are not even

concerned with questions of social change retain evolutionary premises.

These may occasionally be expressed in, for example, contrasts between types

of societies but are often heavily obscured by apparently relativistic concepts

and judgements. The criticism of such material can only be effected through

an epistemology which takes apart the notions which animate particular

texts; the more straightforward exercise which equates a stated position or

assumptions with actual generative premises cannot get to the heart of the

problem.

10. A refocussed anthropological vision would often take a greater

interest in archaeological evidence about longer-term social change. It would

also deal much more extensively with historical events and their conse-

quences: this evidence would assume the same sort of importance that

observed ethnographic minutiae and informants' statements now carry.

Fieldwork would be decentred but not displaced: it is the conjunction of

such intimate knowledge with short- and long-term history which has great

potential in social and cultural analysis, not the pursuit of one endeavour to

the exclusion of the other.

122

Afterword to the second edition (1996)

Since this book was written, the divide between history and anthropology has

become increasingly fuzzy. There are many more strong works grounded in one

discipline that draw upon the research methods and theoretical insights of the

other. In anthropology, it is also notable that an antagonism between symbolic

interpretation and historical contextualization that remained conspicuous in

Melanesian studies up to the end of the 1980s has broken down: the richest work

now links cosmology and ritual with apocalyptic local Christianities and local

constructions of cash-cropping and mining (cf. Foster 1995: chapter 1).

If all books are difficult to write for different reasons, I found this one difficult

because I felt a need to criticize notions that were at once widely discredited yet

also seemed curiously alive. On the one hand, evolutionism seemed old-fashioned

and distant from the point of view of much contemporary anthropology; on the

other, evolutionary metaphors seemed still to inform much writing, especially

when broad-brush comparisons were being made. This is still more the case

today: a recent discussion of Melanesian political forms by a well-known figure

in the field exhibits precisely the from-to logic that I questioned (Godelier 1992),

while, at a much broader level, narratives of progression through successive social

states have gained a new lease on life in the literature on postmodernism and post-

colonialism.

Because I sought to draw attention to discredited but persistent features of

anthropological rhetoric, Out of time unavoidably adopted a critical attitude

toward recent scholarship and thus risked recapitulating one of the features of

intellectual practice that it described. Writers of all kinds as well as scholars define

the singularity and importance of their work not only by making positive claims

but also by reifying and disparaging the work of predecessors. In the specifically

academic context, this has often been effected through the formation of disciplines

and new specialisms, and through moments of professionalization and reprofes-

sionalization. Radcliffe-Brown's Australian monograph, discussed in chapter 2,

exemplifies the tendency to negate the research of predecessors in order to create a

new space for authoritative writing. Most pessimistically, historical anthropology

might be seen as another such exercise in subdisciplinary invention.

123

Afterword to the second edition (1996)

Little would be gained, however, by the relativization of all scholarly projects.

The Radcliffe-Brown case is egregious because the dismissal of predecessors

was in no sense warranted by a substantial advance effected in Radcliffe-Brown's

own ethnography. In other cases meaningful gains are made, and this is surely

true of the one that this book sought to contextualize and consolidate: even if new

competences in archival research are demanded of anthropologists, the aim was

never to create a novel field with its criteria for admission and gatekeepers but

rather to give all anthropological projects a measure of historical sophistication.

But the point that knowledge proceeds through negation has a range of implica-

tions for the arguments of Out of time. In chapter 6, I was concerned to 'rescue'

pre-professional anthropological writers such as missionaries and travellers, and

this effort of affirmation may have suggested that I took the view that these colo-

nial accounts were, in principle, just as good (or just as bad) as those of (profes-

sional) anthropologists. Certainly Johannes Fabian, in a generous review, felt the

need to point out that missionaries' blindnesses and biases, and those of other

travellers, could not be forgotten (1991: 60). I can only agree with the need to

extend the provisional characterizations offered here, and I have drawn upon

Fabian's work in my own subsequent analyses of evangelical discourse (e.g.

1992a).

The best restatement or reformulation of my point might be that all observa-

tions and narratives concerning other peoples need to be scrutinized. While it

may very frequently be the case that anthropological descriptions are more

insightful and less prejudiced than those of antecedents, the professional disci-

pline is too general and crude a factor to itself determine the character or qual-

ity of particular texts. The interpretation of anthropological history in a sequence

beginning with amateurs and leading through phases of professionalization could

indeed be seen as another evolutionary narrative of the kind this book sought to

make more explicit.

Of course, the suggestion that we (anthropologists) needed to engage more

rigorously and expansively with a range of earlier sources concerning the soci-

eties studied was grounded in other arguments too. Most importantly, the point

was not that these accounts were necessarily 'good' or 'bad', sufficient or insuf-

ficient, in themselves but that they contained vital information concerning earlier

social and cultural forms, and the historical constitution of the phenomena wit-

nessed ethnographically, that were simply unobtainable in other ways. In the case

of the Pacific, mariners', colonists' and missionaries' texts can be and need to be

read against the grain, in the fashion that has perhaps been most explicitly

engaged in by Bronwen Douglas (e.g. 1995). (How it is adequately done is,

moreover, explored and exemplified at some length in Sahlins' most recent pub-

lication [1995]).

As Pels and Salemink (n.d.) have recently pointed out, anticolonialism in

anthropology enabled another phase of professionalization, the creation of a

124

Afterword to the second edition (1996)

higher kind of scholarship that disavowed the contamination of engagement in

policy. The professionalizing effort is witnessed again, not only in that more

recent phase of the discipline's history and also in this book's own construction

of a historical anthropology, but most conspicuously in the formation of the new

discipline of cultural studies, which presumes the contamination of anthropol-

ogy by colonial engagement and abrogates to itself the capacity to engage criti-

cally with the object of culture. Given that the problematic aspects of the project

are being discussed as much within the field as without (e.g. Frow 1995), these

debates need not be reviewed here; though, given the perspective of this book, it

is appropriate to note that cultural studies cannot represent an advance on anthro-

pology while it remains obsessively focussed on contemporary texts, and while

its interest in historical contextualization is negligible.

Out of time bracketed off the question of the distinctiveness of indigenous

constructions of time and history. It did so strategically, in order to focus upon

other sets of issues that were in part concerned with the constitution of anthro-

pological knowledge and in part with ways of accounting for longer-term social

transformations, in Oceania in particular. My interest in the latter set of questions

stemmed from a background in archaeology; though I remain of the view that

theorising those longer-term dynamics should continue to be a significant area of

mutual concern for anthropology and archaeology, the issues patently lack con-

temporaneity and urgency from the point of view of most anthropologists today.

In a critique of this book, David Hanlon (1992: 118-19) noted very fairly that

the question of E. H. Carr's classic, What is history? (1961) was never addressed

in a concerted way. Moreover, Bradd Shore complained that, while anthropolo-

gists were berated on various counts in Out of time, 'History' was taken as an

unproblematic category (1992: 123). I am far more sympathetic to the first

response than the second. Shore's review made it plain that he had not read the

book closely, or at least had not understood it (for a detailed response see Thomas

1992b). It was quite clear that I was not advocating the encompassment of

anthropological interpretation by something like conventional empirical narra-

tive history but was interested instead, on the one hand, in an account of social

transformations shorn of all the teleologies and temporal metaphors of evolu-

tionism and, on the other, in a refinement of Sahlins' structural history that

accommodated the interenactment of colonial structures as well as the transfor-

mation of structure that he so consummately identified. While my arguments

here were for the most part polemical and programmatic, I did attempt to demon-

strate how these theoretical perspectives might actually be realized through case

studies in a subsequent book, Entangled objects (Thomas 1991).

As Hanlon had pointed out, however, this was not to do justice to the modal-

ities of indigenous temporal and historical understanding. The book would have

been richer, in particular, had I engaged with Polynesian ideas of political trans-

formation, which can and have been explored via myth (e.g. Sissons 1989); or

125

Afterword to the second edition (1996)

had I been able to take into account Marilyn Strathern's arguments concerning

'first contacts' in Melanesia. Strathern (1990) argued essentially that the arrival

of whites in New Guinea was more like the appearance of an image in a cere-

monial context than an 'event' as we ('Westerners') understand it. Although an

argument specifically from Melanesian modes of perception, this would destabi-

lize both Sahlins' argument concerning Cook and my own, to the extent that the

capacity of these contacts to figure as 'events' that have consequences for the

order of indigenous culture is denied. Strathern's tantalisingly brief comments do

not, of course, amount to an extended account of Melanesian historical (or unhis-

torical) imaginings, though I note that Ballard (1992) has put forward a fuller

argument along similar lines for Huli.

It would not be good enough, though, if these explorations of indigenous

notions and perceptions simply produced a set of discrete ethnographic accounts.

In that case, anthropological relativism would merely have been extended into

another area: where we already had a proliferation of other cultures, socialities

and sexualities, we would now have many historicities. Acknowledging cultural

difference and plurality is important as a moment of research and understanding

but inadequate as a conclusion. The peoples that bear these differing historicities

and cultures are, we need to remember, not a set of mutually isolated groups. We

would not know them as anthropological cases if their lives had not been con-

nected with our own, at whatever remove.

To connect the 'cultures' anthropologists study and the formation of knowl-

edge via colonial relationships is not to presume that either the cultures or the

knowledge are pervasively structured by the larger historical dynamic of colo-

nialism. It is not to presume that local perceptions and cultural differences have

been effaced and homogenized by a global process, or that local meanings have

necessarily been defined by colonial relationships. In some cases, they have

been, but it may also be true, elsewhere, that even oppressive colonial forces do

not transform or hegemonize local historical understandings and narratives. But

where this is so, it attests to singular historical effect rather than the lack of his-

torical effect. While the tension and interplay of colonial and local histories need

to be explored in particular cases, this is why, in principle, an anthropological

history must engage both with the history of anthropological knowledge and with

the dynamics of the local.

References to afterword

Ballard, Chris (1992) First contact as a non-event in the New Guinea highlands. Paper pre-

sented at the American Anthropological Society meetings, San Francisco,

December 1992

Carr, E. H. (1961) What is history? London: Macmillan

126

Afterword to the second edition (1996)

Douglas, Bronwen (1995) Power, discourse, and the appropriation of God: Christianity

and subversion in a Melanesian context. History and Anthropology 9: 57-92

Fabian, Johannes (1991) Anthropology against time. Transition 1 (3): 55-61

Foster, Robert J. (1995) Social reproduction and history in Melanesia. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

Frow, John (1995) Cultural studies and cultural value. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Godelier, Maurice (1992) An unfinished attempt at reconstructing the social processes

which may have prompted the transformation of great-men societies into big-men

societies. In Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern (eds.), Big men and great

men: personifications of power in Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press

Hanlon, David (1992) Time is history? [Book review forum]. Pacific Studies 15: 118-22

Pels, Peter and Oscar Salemink (n.d.) Introduction: the colonial subjects of anthropology.

MS

Sahlins, Marshall (1995) How 'natives' think, about Captain Cook, for example. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press

Shore, Bradd (1992) Out of tune [Book review forum]. Pacific Studies 15: 122-35

Sissons, Jeffrey (1989) The seasonality of power: the Rarotongan legend of Tangiia.

Journal of the Polynesian Society 98: 331-47

Strathern, Marilyn (1990) Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of images. In

Jukka Siikala (ed.), Culture and history in the Pacific. Helsinki: Transactions of the

Finnish Anthropological Society

Thomas, Nicholas (1991) Entangled objects: exchange, material culture and colonialism

in the Pacific. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

(1992a) Colonial conversions: difference, hierarchy, and history in early twentieth cen-

tury evangelical propaganda. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (2):

366-89

(1992b) Historical anthropology and the politics of critique. Pacific Studies 15:

142-58

127



Notes

Introduction

1. I can also save confusion in a minor instance by indicating that I use the term

'colonial history' broadly, to mean histories of any kind of intrusion by

metropolitan powers in less developed territories, rather than in the much

narrower sense of periods of formal colonial rule; the use of the stricter meaning

in some conservative history often implies that there is no informal domination

in the absence of overt administration.

2. The Levi-Strauss essay was first published in 1949. See Kuper (1973: 162-4) for a

brief discussion of the significance of the Evans-Pritchard article.

1 History and anthropological discourse

1. It is notable that reviews of works of history or historical anthropology very

frequently raise questions about the adequacy of non-anthropological source

materials (such as missionaries' writings), making invidious comparisons between

these and ethnographic observations (e.g. Bloch 1987). It is as though this is a

general weakness which can simply be pointed out: there is no need to

demonstrate that the faults of these sources actually introduce errors in

description or analysis. In most anthropological accounts there are, however,

invariably comparable sources of 'bias', such as the preponderance of senior men

amongst informants, but this has only been discussed extensively in the context

of feminist critique, and is certainly a rare point for comment in book reviews.

2. Evans-Pritchard's essays on the topic (1962) made a number of points with which

I can only agree, but these could hardly be seen to have borne fruit in the British

context. A collection of history and anthropology was published by the

Association of Social Anthropologists (Lewis (ed.) 1968) on the basis of their

1966 conference; the institutional origins of the volume enable one to regard it

as reasonably representative of thought at the time. What is notable about the

essays, however, is that there are really none which go far toward integrating

historical and anthropological methods or concerns. Those by historians simply

show that some anthropological concepts are of interest in the interpretation of

past societies, and some of those by anthropologists lean toward conventional

history (e.g. Ardener) whilst others set up a kind of interaction while reinforcing

the division between objects of study (Morton-Williams). One concerned with

Albania aims partly to establish 'a picture of the traditional social structure of

the country' (Whittaker 1968: 253), which is as unhistorical a notion as one is

likely to encounter.

129

Notes to pages 11-22

3. Even a recent, sophisticated collection on foragers is ambiguous on this matter:

'Foraging peoples have played an important role in human history. They

represent the original condition of humankind, the system of production that

prevailed during virtually 99 per cent of human history. Having said that, it is

important to make two caveats. First, contemporary or recent foragers are not

living fossils, their history and their distance from humanity's ancestors are as

long as those of all human groups. It is their economy and technology that make

foragers so important for science. They represent a basic human adaptation

without the accretions and complications brought about by agriculture, cities,

states, advanced technology, and national and class conflict. Second, foraging

people are not isolates, they are living in the twentieth century and are moulded

in part by that context' (Leacock and Lee 1982: 5).

The question here is whether the recognition of the latter factors overrides the

basic presumptions expressed in the first two sentences. A point which is only

mentioned later (ibid: 13), which qualifies those propositions much more heavily

than the 'caveats', is that virtually all hunter-gatherer populations in Africa and

Asia, as well as many of those elsewhere, have lived for thousands of years in

direct and indirect contact, and frequently in competition, with those practising

different modes of production. Although a number of writers have linked the

features of some of these societies to the fact of their 'encapsulation', the

necessary conclusion that such groups can be in no way representative of earlier

foragers might be made more forcefully.

4. Leenhardt's ethnography (notably 1947) and some other anthropological works

were incorporated into a manifesto of 'the Melanesian way' by the FLNKS

(Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front) in New Caledonia or, as they

prefer, Kanake (Tjibaou and Missotte 1978).

2 Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz and the foundations of modern anthropology

1. Fortes maintained in 1949 that 'No living scholar has had so decisive an influence

on the development of social anthropology' (1949a: ix; for his more extended

considerations see Fortes 1969). This judgement would never have been shared

by American anthropologists, who saw themselves as 'cultural' rather than

'social', but the fact that Radcliffe-Brown's work had some impact on the

discipline in the United States is reflected in the number of American

contributions to the volume of essays edited by Fortes in honour of his work (five

out of eleven). In this brief section I do not attempt a full review of Radcliffe-

Brown's work, or even of his earlier work. For fuller discussion see Kuper 1973;

chapter 2; Evans-Pritchard 1981: 200-2; Langham 1981; and, for the most

extended and historically balanced treatment, Stocking 1984.

2. Leach, for instance, described him as a 'fraud' (1977: 6).

3. This is still the dominant view, but, as I argue below (chapter 6), many

missionaries and others did in fact combine an ethnographic vision with

extended personal inquiry.

4. Langham (1981: 245). Langham's analysis has been criticized on some important

points (Stocking 1984: 135n; Urry 1983), but this particular argument has not

been challenged.

5. This question is significant from the point of view of contemporary theory,

because the development of archaeological techniques (and secure dating in

particular) since the time of Radcliffe-Brown's formulations now make it possible

to know about some past events and processes. It is another question as to

130

Notes to pages 22-26

whether this kind of knowledge can be readily integrated with the anthropological

knowledge of modern or recent societies. It is also the case that Radcliffe-

Brown's prescription assumes that all groups studied by anthropologists are like

the Andamanese in the sense that there is no literary documentation of events

prior to European contact, but many of the societies studied by anthropologists

(e.g. in Asia) possessed bodies of textual material and inscriptions, or were

mentioned in texts produced by others. (The question of the status of indigenous

oral traditions and their value for historical reconstruction is a vexed one.) Of

course, literary materials such as epics and genealogical narratives might be

dismissed because they often do not deal with what westerners recognize as

'history', but that difficulty should perhaps prompt questions about our

category, rather than the rejection of such source materials.

A further point of some consequence in this context is the persistence of the

conflation of history and speculative schema of one sort or another. In Auge's

recent essay on 'Symbol, function [and] history' in anthropological thought, the

third term is roughly equated with 'evolution' or 'evolution/diffusion' (1982:

10-16). There is no reference to eventful, socially immediate history.

6. A rare indication of the extent of some of the effects of contact emerges from a

footnote of Radcliffe-Brown's acknowledging his difficulty in obtaining in-

formation concerning sexual notions: 'the natives of the Great Andaman at the

present time show an unusual prudery in their conversation and dealings with

white men, but there is good reason to suspect that this is due to the influence of

officers who have been in charge of the Andaman home [a welfare and

surveillance institution] in recent years' (1922: 321-2n).

7. That R. H. Mathews' work was unjustly criticized was established by Elkin

(1956: 249-50; see also Langham 1981: 290-1). It is somewhat ironic that

Radcliffe-Brown should raise questions about other investigators' informants,

since some of his own research was with Aborigines transported from their tribal

areas to hospitals for those suffering from venereal disease; much of the material

was derived from 'communities decimated by contact with white society'

(Langham 1981: 265). The significance of the Australian monograph is apparent

from a statement of Fortes: 'in my personal perspective ... the modern era in the

study of kinship and social organization is first firmly established with the

publication of Radcliffe-Brown's 1931 monograph' (1969: 42). It must be

pointed out, however, that Fortes' especially high regard for Radcliffe-Brown's

work lies at one end of a spectrum. There has also been a long-running debate

about allegations that he plagiarized the work of his sometime collaborator,

Daisy Bates (Needham 1974; White 1981).

8. My point here is not that Radcliffe-Brown had some sort of conscious master-

plan for displacing those unfortunate enough to attempt serious ethnography

before its time, but that this was the effect of practices and statements such as

those expressed in this text. This situation arose from a conjunction of scientistic

attitudes and the process of professionalization, and the personal empathies or

antipathies of writers such as Radcliffe-Brown to their predecessors are not

especially important. As the more detailed studies of Langham, Stocking and

others make plain, the transition to a professional discipline was far more fuzzy

than anthropologists later generally perceived, but the complex interactions

between teachers, disciples, rivals, institutions, etc., are beyond my vision here.

9. It should be emphasized that this section is not a discussion of the totality of

Geertz's work, but is simply concerned to establish the very basic features which

the 'interpretive anthropology' approach shares with the perspective of Radcliffe-

131

Notes to pages 26-33

Brown. A substantial component of Geertz's work (such as that on Indonesian

agricultural change) is not to be subsumed under the 'interpretive anthropology'

label, and I do not expect that he would, in any case, put forward the same

formulations today. However, his most influential texts have expressed the

'interpretive' position. For further discussion of his work see Marcus and

Fischer (1986: passim) and, for a more critical view, Austin (1979); see also the

responses to her essay by Wagner, Sharrock, Barnes and others, which appear in

the same issue of Social Analysis.

I would add, though, that while Geertz's later book, Negara (1980), might

appear to be a work of historical anthropology, this is true only in the very

limited sense that it draws on historical sources concerning nineteenth-century

Balinese polities. The orientation is in fact toward abstracting the elements of an

ideal type (the theatre state) and showing that this persisted in different historical

contexts, as is apparent in many passages such as 'the expressive nature of the

Balinese state was apparent through the whole of its known history' (1980: 13);

the 'divine king cult' is attributed with an 'essentially constant cultural form'

(ibid: 125), and so on. The book deals avowedly with a synchronic entity rather

than one which has social or historical dynamics.

10 This emphasis is partly justified on the basis of a tenet that if one wants to

understand a science, attention should be paid not to theories or conclusions, but

to 'what the practitioners of it do' (1973: 5). This is fine, but Geertz proceeded

to ignore the fact that a typical anthropological career might consist of a few

years' fieldwork and about thirty or forty years' writing and teaching - as well,

perhaps, as such activities as acting as an advisor for ethnographic films or

museum exhibitions, involvement in 'development' policy or implementation,

making occasional public statements about current affairs in areas supposedly

covered by one's expert knowledge, legal representations on behalf of indigenous

peoples, and so on. What anthropologists do cannot be reduced to ethnography.

I stress particularly that the practice of reading and interpreting anthropological

literature in general - whether for teaching, or synthesizing, comparative

purposes, or idle pleasure - is a necessary and not a contingent feature of

anthropological practice. The questions of how information is derived from

anthropological texts and subsequently used therefore has a bearing on the

discipline's epistemology, and this is why I discuss in chapters 4 and 5 the effects

of Handy's Marquesan ethnography - and museum research in general - in

Goldman's analytic synthesis of the Polynesian material.

11. This formulation makes anthropologists' research on their own societies radically

marginal to the concept of the discipline; the existence of such research is

acknowledged, significantly, only in a footnote (1973: 14n).

3 The background to Polynesian anthropology

1. For an overview of European perceptions of the Pacific in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, see Smith's justly celebrated European vision and the South

Pacific (1960); for a rather orthodox review of Pacific history (there being no

other) see Howe (1984); and, for the later development of anthropological and

particularly archaeological research, see Kirch (1984: 1-13). Forster is discussed

by Hoare (1976).

2. The other main exception is Hogbin's work on Ontong Java (e.g. 1931).

3. A recent collection (Stocking 1985) deals with anthropology in museums, but not

particularly with museum-sponsored ethnographic research projects, or the form

of ethnographic discourse generated by such work.

132

Notes to pages 35-36

4 An evolutionary argument and its sources

1. Goldman's book is also celebrated and drawn upon extensively by Sherry Ortner

in her appraisal of Polynesian gender relations (1981), which appeared in an

influential collection of symbolic studies of gender and sexuality. I have elsewhere

argued (1986b) that misinterpretations in her analysis derive substantially from

an over-reliance upon Goldman.

It is obviously not the point of the present discussion to assess the empirical

adequacy of Goldman's book in great detail. But since the general view is

charitable, it should be stressed that Goldman's lack of personal research

experience in the Pacific and dependence on mainly inadequate secondary

materials lead to many minor errors. A typical mistake which no-one more

familiar with the Pacific would make is his use of the missionary Gunn's

reminiscences (1914) in the section on Futuna (1970: 334), obviously without

realizing that Gunn's Futuna was a completely different island, part of what is

now Vanuatu in the western Pacific, and not the place north-east of Fiji which

forms part of the modern French territory of Wallis and Futuna. Cambridge,

Massachusetts, is not Cambridge, England. By any standard this is simply

carelessness, but it should be pointed out that my criticism of Goldman's work

in general draws on historical knowledge and a perspective which was not

available at the time he wrote the book; he says that it was essentially complete

in 1966 (1970: xiii), which was the year in which the Journal of Pacific History

was launched, and about the time when accessible and detailed information

about contact histories and the impact of colonialism began to appear. Since

then, knowledge of early Polynesian societies and of the kinds of documentation

available has increased very considerably. I cannot therefore criticize his analysis

for failing to incorporate material which was scarcely available at the time, but

I do believe that even consideration of standard reactions to evolutionism, and

the sorts of question raised by Evans-Pritchard's 'History and anthropology'

essay (1962) might have motivated some conceptual reworking.

2. Goldman starts with the New Zealand Maori who exemplify the traditional

system. Manihiki and Rakahanga (considered conjointly) and Tongareva (all in

the Cook Islands), which follow, are not seen as later developments but as

'examples of Maori structure as adapted to the smaller conditions of atolls'

(1970: 27). Easter Island, the Marquesas and Mangaia (in the Cook Islands) are

variants of the open type; again, the order of presentation is not supposed to

reflect any developmental rank. However, Mangareva, the Societies, and Hawaii,

'the three Stratified societies of eastern Polynesia suggest an approximate

evolutionary sequence' (1970: 27). In western Polynesia, Samoan societies are

open while Tonga 'equates with Tahiti and Hawaii as a Stratified society' (1970:

24). The other western Polynesian groups are considered as variants on 'the

Samoa-Tonga type' and are not ranked 'in any evolutionary order' (1970:

27-8). There is thus a clear difference of method in the presentation of eastern

and western material; I shall argue later that this is of some theoretical

consequence.

The choice of New Zealand as a starting point is curious because it is likely to

have been the last place in Polynesia to be settled (Kirch 1984: 74-9), and

therefore its social forms would surely be expected to reflect late and distinctive

developments (especially since the two large islands contrast geographically and

ecologically with the rest of Polynesia in every significant respect). There can be

no prior justification for seeing the three Cook Islands cases as adaptations of

this pattern; if one group of societies must be seen as a locally adapted form of

133

Notes to pages 36-42

the other - and this is not the only possible explanatory strategy - it would be

more plausible to see the more recently settled, peripheral case as logically

subordinate to the central area.

3. In the analysis itself, Goldman moves between partial repudiation of this type of

logic, and its thinly veiled employment. Thus in the chapter on the Marquesas,

he writes

The divergence from Maori is solely in pattern of organization arising from specific

emphases on different issues. Thus even if we have no assurance that the Marquesan Open

was an actual historical development from a specifically Maori Traditional there is good

reason to regard the Marquesan system as a structural variant of a type similar to that of

Maori.

(1970: 133)

At a more particular level, many distinctive features of the systems in the

Marquesas and Manihiki/Rakahanga (for example) are discussed in terms of

similarity with or variation upon Maori forms (1970: 58-64 passim; 132, 146,

148).

4. The chapter of Lewis's to which I refer was originally published in Man in 1966.

5. Out of the eighteen 'societies' studied, the accounts of eleven are exclusively or

nearly exclusively based on Bishop Museum publications (which had a standard

form and which were mainly based on the research of museum staff). In five more

cases, Bishop Museum documentation, or other work by Peter Buck or E. S. C.

Handy of the Museum, was significant. Buck's approach must be seen as

particularly important, since his writing is a major source, if not the only source,

for no fewer than five of the societies. Ian Hogbin's papers and Firth's much

more extensive works provided the basis for Goldman's discussions of the

outliers of Ontong Java and Tikopia respectively. In these two cases alone, the

sources reflected the British structural-functionalist tradition rather than a

primarily American, trenchantly empiricist, pre-functionalist museum anthro-

pology.

It is not surprising that the Polynesian groups not considered by Goldman were

precisely those for which there was no Bishop Museum publications. Despite the

fact that Rarotonga sustained the largest population in the Cook Islands, and

became the dominant place within the group, it is not discussed, although

Rarotongan culture is well documented through the missionary Gill's publica-

tions (e.g. 1876a, b, 1916), among many others (see Gilson 1980). Tuvalu

(formerly the Ellice Islands) was the only group never visited by a Bishop

Museum expedition; ethnographic bulletins on Rapa and Rurutu in the Austral

Islands were prepared (Stokes n.d.; Seabrook n.d.) but never published.

Although research was conducted in the Tuamotus, and archaeological reports

and translations of myths were issued, a general ethnography was never

produced (cf. Buck 1945: 85). Thus Tuvalu, the Australs and the Tuamotus do

not figure in Goldman's analysis. It might also be noted that the extent to which

Goldman deals with variation within groups reflects the pattern of Bishop

Museum documentation. The Society Islands are treated as a monocultural

entity, as they were in Museum publications. For adventitious reasons, the Cooks

were never visited by a large expedition but were rather dealt with by Buck in the

course of several short trips, which resulted in separate bulletins on different

islands. Thus Tongareva and Manihiki/Rakahanga in the northern Cooks are

treated separately, while the much larger islands of Raiatea, Taha'a and Huahine

are lumped together with Tahiti as part of the Society group. However, as

Gunson has noted, evidence for social variation is 'too marked to be ignored'

(1982: 68).

134

Notes to pages 42-47

Sahlins' 1958 work similarly relied very heavily on the Bishop Museum bulletins,

and paid no attention to areas (other than Tikopia and Ontong Java) which were

not 'covered' by ethnographic bulletins. Essentially the same misinterpretations

as I proceed to identify in Goldman's book are found in Sahlins' work, and in

some cases these are exacerbated by the use of even more unreliable sources, such

as Linton's (1939) subsequent synthesis of the Marquesan data, which is riddled

with both minor and highly consequential empirical errors, overstatements,

misinterpretations, etc. (see Dening 1980; Thomas 1989).

For further discussion of the context and premises of Bishop Museum research,

see Borofsky's discussion (1987: 45-50) of the Pukapukan work of E. and P.

Beaglehole (1938).

6. The initiation of this bold pan-Polynesian project had much to do with Herbert

Gregory, a vigorous and enterprising Yale geologist who became Acting Director

of the Museum in 1919 and was subsequently Director until 1936, when Peter

Buck (who usually referred to himself by his Maori name, Te Rangi Hiroa) took

over. Gregory actively developed the affiliation with Yale, which funded various

fellowships, and was also apparently instrumental in securing philanthropic

funding on a large scale for various expeditions. The first Pacific Science

Congress was held in Hawaii in 1920 and seems to have fuelled the Bishop

Museum's ethnographic venture. 'An outline of the scope and methods to be

applied to Polynesia was formulated' and research was to take place 'under the

headings of material culture and art, mythology and religion, social organization,

language, music, and historical research' (Buck 1945: 44). A guide for

fieldworkers along the lines of the British Notes and Queries in Anthropology was

produced.

7. This notion is hardly a thing of the past: 'My focus will be the small island of

Santa Catalina ... where the precolonial culture was best preserved' (Davenport

1986: 95) - an arbitrarily selected example.

8. As I shall argue below, the Bishop Museum writers frequently denigrated

missionaries in general but did draw on missionary writings - although in an

inconsistent and careless way (cf. next chapter). A curious feature of the pattern

of their use of such sources was that any documents actually encountered in the

island group where work was being carried out were worked over and often

incorporated into the publication (usually only with partial acknowledgement),

but there was never any effort made to track down relevant manuscripts by

missionaries or anybody else elsewhere. Manuscripts concerning the Marquesas,

Tahiti and various other groups which were actually in mission archives in

Honolulu near the Museum were never examined, and of course there were no

special trips to libraries in the mainland United States or Europe. Ethnography

was the method of research, even though much of the information collected in the

field was derived not from observation but from recollections or written

materials.

9. This attitude is underlined by a comment of E. S. C. Handy on Williamson's

Social and political systems of central Polynesia (1924), an extensive work based

upon library research. Handy regrets that Williamson was unaware of the Bishop

Museum research in the area (which in fact only began in 1920) and asserted that

the 'full and authentic information' derived therefrom 'automatically relegated

the literary sources to a position of secondary importance, and made unnecessary

the laborious process of examination and deduction with which [Williamson] has

filled three volumes' (Handy 1930: 4 n2).

The claim that library work is essentially redundant would have some

135

Notes to pages 47-52

plausibility if modern ethnographic research had in fact produced an intricate

and satisfying picture of the 'traditional' cultures. This was certainly so in a few

instances: it would have to be acknowledged that observations on Dumont

D'Urville's 1820s voyage add little to Firth's incomparably rich account of

Tikopian society. But the picture is different if not inverted for many of the

islands and groups covered by Bishop Museum research. For some places like

Tahiti an enormous range of early descriptions exist, while the complexities of

colonial history and the mission presence make the results of fieldwork in the

twenties or thirties both slim and problematic: Handy's text on the Society

Islands was one of the sparsest of the Museum's publications. Although the view

that salvage ethnography displaced literary sources is therefore untenable in its

own terms, the key premise must be questioned: as I argue at greater length

below, the whole style of comparison must be thrown out unless one supposes

that knowledges of a place in 1820 and 1940 or 1980 are the same to the extent

that they can be substituted for one another. It is as though a poor account from

some period may be rejected, and a later description relied upon exclusively.

10. A correlate of this prior familiarity with culturally associated groups would,

however, have been that knowledge of other places - and no doubt a developed

sense of 'what Polynesia was like' - helped fill in the picture, biasing it towards

a Polynesian or regional Polynesian type. Society Islands material might have

overinfluenced that depiction of Mangareva, Tupuai and the Tuamotus, for

instance. Goldman himself suspected that this took place in Buck's description

of Tongareva, which he suggested 'portrays the traditional forms more strongly

perhaps than they really were' (1970: 70).

11. This may seem a crude and overdrawn parallel, but the most cursory examination

of publications on Tonga reveals that the influence of the elite there and that of

the former Queen Salote in particular upon scholarship has been so considerable

that many works have virtually had the character of official publications (e.g.

Rutherford 1977). The problem in Polynesian studies of the circumscription of

scholarship by chiefly perspectives has certainly not been restricted to the work

of the Bishop Museum.

5 Untying evidence, rethinking transformations

1. The Marquesas are a group of six islands some 1,200 kilometres north-east of

Tahiti. Before the period of early contact (roughly 1790-1820) the population

was about 35,000, but fell very rapidly because of disease, and from the 1880s on

was around 5,000 or less. Traditional subsistence was primarily agriculture (taro,

yams, and especially breadfruit) and fishing. Topographically there were and are

distinct separations between valleys, and the inhabitants - between a few

hundred and about a thousand in number - constituted the main social groups.

By the time of Handy's research the catastrophic depopulation, and the effects of

the Catholic mission and French administration, had had very marked effects,

although the involvement of the people in production for cash and wider markets

was very limited until much later.

The critique here is based on some much more extended studies. Rather than

clutter the text with frequent citations, I simply refer the reader interested in

further detail or documentation to my main work on the islands (Thomas 1990).

2. The basis of the account was strengthened by Handy's use of certain earlier

exercises in salvage ethnography - the papers of Pierre Chaulet and Rene

Dordillon in the archives of the Catholic mission at Taiohae. These, and

particularly Chaulet's extensive manuscript essays, describe a wide range of

136

Notes to pages 52-56

customs, rites and beliefs, and include legendary material and many specific

listings of such things as the deities associated with particular activities or places.

Chaulet arrived in the Marquesas in 1852 and, judging from his letters, took an

interest in ethnography from the start. His informants were mainly indigenous

priests (tuhuna o'ono and tau'a) from Nukuhiva, but Chaulet also obtained

material from informants from other parts of the group; he sometimes indicates

that a rite (for example) was peculiar to an island or locality. Although Handy

quotes or alludes to many passages, it is clear that his debt to these manuscripts

goes beyond these particular references. Although many of the lesser mission

sources were ignored, and the better ones were used in an erratic and

undisciplined way, the account nonetheless benefited considerably from an

extensive process of linguistically-sensitive observation and inquiry which took

place between seventy and forty years before Handy's own research.

3. These labels carry an ideological burden, even though they may be used loosely.

For discussion of Sahlins' more influential parallel between Polynesian chiefs and

feudal lords, on one side, and Melanesian big-men and capitalist entrepreneurs,

see Jolly (1987).

4. The outward manifestations of deference and respect might have been detected

if observers had looked to these more particular contexts: 'Every chief seems to

have considerable power over his own dependants in a certain way' (Darling,

1834-35:10 April 1835; emphasis added). That there was some definite degree of

control is also reflected in the capacities of particular chiefs such as Keoenui (on

the island of Tahuata in the 1830s) to keep people away from missionaries'

services if alienated from or offended by the mission in some way.

5. It might be noted here that a widespread strategy in contemporary an-

thropological debate involves identifying a particular feature of an earlier view

as 'ethnocentric' and revising the interpretation along different theoretical lines.

This is dishonest to the extent that it uses the unquestionable need to 'minimize

bias' as a cover for theoretical difference. The fact that some sort of

'ethnocentrism' is a necessary and inevitable feature of any sort of discourse at

all is ignored; some aspects of one's culture are obviously going to pass

unscrutinized while others are contraposed to the other culture and used to

animate an argument. The charge of ethnocentrism is thus always an argument

about what should be discussed, rather than a serious critique of the properties

of analysis.

6. The Catholic mission sometimes organised 'elections' at which mission-

sponsored candidates were unanimously supported (Acar, Journal: 25 August

1895). Thomas Lawson, an English resident on 'Ua Huka who was engaged

mainly in provisioning ships, attempted to see one man, Teikimoetina, declared

the paramount chief of the island, so as to maintain a state of law and order

(Lawson to Gulick, January 1868). Robert Louis Stevenson, who visited the

Marquesas in 1888, met a man who was kikino (of servile status) but apparently

chief of Taipi valley nevertheless (1900: 44-6).

7. Marquesans did distinguish between the epochs of indigenous people and 'the

time of foreigners' (te tai hao'e). There were probably more specific categories

related to phases in the nineteenth century, but these are not documented, and

are unlikely in any case to have corresponded with the ethnologist's desire to

distinguish what was genuinely pre-contact. By the 1920s, the pre-contact period

was really very remote, especially given the changes which had taken place, and

the fact particularly that most priests, who were the traditional repositories of

traditions and specialized knowledge, had died rather earlier.

8. A degree of idealization may be the source of discrepancies between Handy's

137

Notes to pages 56-65

account of chieftainship and land relations, and the picture which can be derived

from a reading of early sources. He stressed the likeness between the tribe and a

family, and argued that the chief was a benevolent father figure who owned the

land, just as a household head controls the family's resources (1923: 35, 42, 43,

53, 57-8). He noted that although the overall pattern 'was more or less

communistic', there seemed in some parts of the group to be a 'feudal' tendency,

'under which the chief allotted sections of land to individual families and

received in return a part of the produce and service in war or industry' (ibid: 57).

9. Edward Robarts wrote, for instance, that 'No chieftain can force a tribute from

anyone excepting those on his own private estate' ([1974]: 266). Much later the

missionary Chaulet similarly insisted that there was no sort of general chiefly

ownership:

I have sometimes heard from foreigners who talk about the Marquesas without knowing the

customs that the chief is the master of his valley, and that he can dispose of it as he wishes.

This is an error; I have always heard the natives say the opposite; I've always seen the

opposite, which is simply natural and consistent with justice which says that you can't give

what doesn't belong to you; certainly a chief who acted otherwise would formerly have

caused a war.

(Chaulet, AMS: 48-9)

Since statements to the contrary are made, this matter would seem hopelessly

confused - unless one consults the evidence about what was actually done with

land by various chiefly and non-chiefly people in the early years of contact and

documentation. This is not the place to go into great detail about what can be

derived from the missionary account and from Robarts' narrative, but it is

apparent that certain chiefly men and women possessed considerable areas, but

also that a number of people who were not of chiefly status had considerable

holdings; some controlled canoes and fishing grounds as well as land. In some

instances it is clear that these 'akatia or 'persons of property' held land which

they personally had expropriated from others.

It might be pointed out here that in Sahlins' evolutionary book (1958) the use of

unreliable Bishop Museum sources permitted him to link distinct cases such as

Marquesan society - where chiefs did not play a central role in redistributing

surplus produce - with his overall stereotype of the chiefdom as a redistributive

system. A closer analysis of detailed early accounts of Polynesian societies makes

it clear that many societies in which chiefs were influential were not 'chiefdoms'

in this sense.

10. This refers to the crucial item of regalia: girdles were to sovereignty as rings are

to engagement.

11. The 'devolved' character of Rapanui society is virtually recognized in Goldman's

earlier article (1955), but is suppressed or very much understated in the book

because of its incompatibility with the overall argument.

12. The profound character of the movement away from chieftainship is also

manifest in the distinct contexts of human sacrifice in the various islands. The

practice of sacrifice in general arises from a need to deal with or incorporate some

form of divine power. A specific sacrifice creates completeness in a relation

between people and a god where there was previously a lack - produced either by

some fault or transgression, or simply by the incompleteness of propitiation,

which must be periodically repeated. Many activities such as fishing must be

preceded by some minor sacrifice, which was carried out by the practitioner or

on their behalf. The control of such minor and everyday sacrifices is not generally

a matter of great political consequence, since their ends are often those of one

person or a small group. Human sacrifice, on the other hand, is only connected

138

Notes to pages 65-69

with matters of the most fundamental and general importance, which reflect the

conditions of existence of society as a whole. In a system encompassed by

kingship, the rulers' life crises are occasions for human sacrifice since, as Valeri

points out, the existence of society is linked to the life of the royal personage: 'in

these rites society is not distinguished from the person of the king who symbolizes

it' (1985: 49-50). In Tahiti the main occasions for human victims seem to have

been the birth and accession of paramount chiefs or ari'i rahi, when all the district

chiefs brought one or two victims to the marae of 'Oro, where the eyes were

scooped out and given to the king ([Haweis] 1798: I11 ; Turnbull 1813: 381). The

encompassing character of sovereignty was not only reflected by this ritual but

also tested and created through it, since districts might or might not provide

victims. This matter was quite central to political struggles and new configura-

tions which developed in Tahiti around the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The issue was essentially whether or not the island as a whole would recognize

the authority and legitimacy of the Pomare line, from the Pare-Arue districts.

The marae of 'Oro was actually in the territory of Atehuru and since the people

of that district considered Pomare II a usurper, they would not permit the

ceremony of his 'coronation' to take place. It was only after Pomare subdued the

Atehuru districts in 1802 that the sacrifices and ceremonies were completed. The

intimate connection between the paramount chiefship and sacrifice is illustrated

in responses to the Bounty mutineers' suggestions that the practice should be

abandoned:

we often tryd in vain to dissuade the Chiefs to drop their Barbarous Customs, who always

gave for answer, 'If we do there will be no more chiefs'. (Morrison 1935: 207)

It is not surprising, then, that on Rapanui human sacrifice had nothing to do with

the ariki mau but was rather connected with the god Makemake, who was closely

associated with the bird man cult; demands for human victims were expressed by

Makemake through a shaman (or ivi atua). The situation of sacrifice in the

Marquesas is complicated by inconsistencies between accounts, but it seems that

certain shamans who had achieved the status of living gods (atua) actually

became receivers of sacrifices and consumed the victim, or part of the victim, in

a trance. When there was no living atua, the sacrifice was carried out jointly by

other priests, including shamans. Sources usually suggest that most of the body

was not eaten but left at the me'ae for the god. The large quantities of charred

and broken human bone in some archaeological deposits, however, indicate that

bodies were at least sometimes cooked and consumed. This is an instance where

the archaeological evidence is clear upon a point which is obscure in ethnographic

and historical sources.

13. There are hints that the same processes were taking place on Easter Island

(Routledge, Ethnology, I: 52; Notes, IV; 41f.).

6 Travellers philosophical and unphilosophical

1. A typical recent manifestation of this consensus can be found in an overview of

initiation (La Fontaine 1985). The weakness of Frazer's writings are traced to his

sources, who were supposedly typically 'missionaries who regarded [the people

they described] either as benighted heathens, children of the devil, or else ... as

innocent reminders of a Golden Age' (1985: 21). But as Leach (1961)

demonstrated, the principal flaw in Frazer's use of evidence was that he

consistently misquoted and distorted sources which were often adequate enough

as descriptions in themselves.

139

Notes to pages 72-92

2. Such at least was a typical view in the London Missionary Society (LMS). Of

course, the approaches of Protestants and Catholics, and of the numerous

denominations and orders, were varied.

3. On the significance of 'method' in colonial practice, see Fabian (in press).

4. Such personal prefaces often discuss the mistakes and embarrassments of early

days of fieldwork - which amounts to an indirect way of asserting the

ethnographer's competence, since such problems are always shown to have been

encompassed by subsequent understanding and insight.

5. David Darling, for example, claimed in one place that the 'taboo' system was

quite arbitrary, that prohibitions were 'simply as they pleased to make them' but

elsewhere endeavoured to specify and systematize the principles which generated

tapu, such as rank, associations with deities, and suchlike (Darling, 1834-35: 6

May 1836; compare 'Tapu' section in 'Remarks' appended to the journal).

6. This seems to have been written by the LMS luminary and intellectual Greatheed

on the basis of William Pasco Crook's observations, and information from

Temoteitei, a Marquesan boy who had been brought back to England.

7. The account of the voyage of the Duff was also divided in approximately this

way, and it was specifically noted that there was a kind of complementarity

between the two sorts of discourse: 'a prior perusal of the dissertations [on "the

natural and civil state of Otaheite "] will therefore be useful to those of our

readers who desire to have in view the circumstances and established customs of

the natives, while they peruse the history' (Wilson 1799: vi). Some ambiguity and

uncertainty about which was primary is perhaps reflected in the fact that the so-

called 'Preliminary discourse' is in some editions at the beginning of the volume

and in others at the end.

8. One singular feature of modern research is that it has no purpose apart from

collecting information. But (as with census data) this could not be taken to mean

that the data is unproblematic, and not grounded in a particular project, or

uncomplicated by the difficulties informants would have in talking to e.g.

colonial officials. All of these questions relate to the particular issue of how the

ethnographer is perceived, which is, of course, variable.

9. 'Race' and 'nation' seem to have been used almost interchangeably at this time,

reflecting the compounding of mental and physical characteristics.

10. The classic study is Smith's European vision and the South Pacific (1960). See also

Dening (1986) on the extraordinarily successful eighteenth-century pantomime,

Omai, which was based on Tahitian material.

11. Smith (1960); these ideas persist today in popular literature and tourist

advertising about the South Seas. Hawaii is presented as the land of aloha (love),

which, as Sahlins has pointed out (1985a: 3), is generally mistranslated, since the

word formerly referred more to affection and compassion for kin than sexual

passion.

12. This blurring homogenization of different times would not, of course, be the

same as the far more productive exercise of attempting to demonstrate that basic

features of Fijian culture persisted over time and were manifested under different

circumstances: such an endeavour would attend to, rather than erase, contextual

variation over time.

7 Evolution of another sort: regional systems theory and the Pacific

1. This issue is also considered in a recent restatement of the significance of

Polynesian evidence for evolutionary analysis (Kirch and Green 1987). They

140

Notes to pages 92-93

emphasize that a variety of historical and adaptive processes need to be

incorporated into a general evolutionary model, and break clearly from theories

which emphasize 'stages' or unilinear processes. Although in its insistence upon

the significance of history, this is a substantial advance upon certain other views

within anthropology (e.g. Dunnell 1980), the authors' emphases upon mechan-

isms derived directly from biological evolution, such as selective pressures and

adaptation, are problematic: it is not clear whether this is intended simply as a

metaphoric way of discussing certain processes, or whether this type of systemic

logic is actually being imputed to the systems described. Apparent reliance upon

the notion of adaptation is especially problematic, as the dependence of this

concept upon a discredited functionalist view of social and ecological systems has

been well established. On this point, see particularly Ingold's study of reindeer

economies (1980), which exposes both the theoretical limitations of ecological-

evolutionary paradigms, and their inability to account for social determination

and the crisis-ridden character of the particular systems with which he is

concerned. Another difficulty arises from a partial reliance upon the stratified-

unstratified continuum in the description and differentiation of the Polynesian

systems: Tonga and Hawaii are taken to exhibit 'convergent' evolution, because

both developed 'true class stratification' independently (Kirch and Green 1987:

443); this is to ignore completely the fundamentally divergent nature of these

systems of social reproduction - in the former case, but not in the latter, external

exchange was clearly crucial. The tendency in this particular article, and in

'evolutionary' writing in archaeology generally, has been to overlook altogether

or at least diminish the significance of social processes, and instead discuss

imputed systemic mechanisms in terms which sound scientific but seem entirely

detached from actual events and processes in the histories of the groups

considered.

2. A feature of Tongan society which was consistent with Friedman's model of the

prestige-goods form was the separation of religious and secular leadership. This

is an aspect of the general pattern of 'dualism' emphasized by Friedman, and is

found unevenly across the region. In the Fijian polity of Bau, for instance, there

was a sacred paramount (the Roko Tui Bau) and a war chief (the Vunivalu). In

Tonga there was actually at one time a trial divisicn with two executive rulers,

the Tui Ha'atakalaua and the Tui Kanukupolu (although the former title had

been discontinued before contact) and the higher ranking, sacred Tui Tonga. The

problem for Friedman's argument is that the Tongan oral traditions which

describe the establishment of these titles stress their recency in a precise

genealogical time-scale (Gifford 1924). It could be argued that the royal history

has fabricated the former existence of a unitary chiefship embracing all functions,

but such a claim would only become plausible if supported by specific arguments

as to why such a charter should be called for. It is also relevant that the titles are

peculiar to Tonga, unlike general terms such as tui which are widely distributed

in western Polynesia and presumably therefore reflect some older and more

general complex. This element of the prestige-goods system is thus very likely to

be a late development. Moreover, the archaeological evidence for the trade with

Fiji and Samoa which channelled the crucial prestige-goods suggests a date of

about 1500 for the beginnings of the pattern of interaction observed by Cook and

others late in the eighteenth century (e.g. Davidson 1977, 1978; Kirch 1984). The

problem is thus simply that a distinctive early contact situation is taken as a

model for a prehistory which spans several millennia.

My discussion of Friedman's work is confined to issues of theoretical

141

Notes to pages 93-120

significance: his paper on the Pacific contains various more specific mis-

interpretations or unwarranted speculations which I do not pursue here.

3. The evidence is not, however, clear cut: the early nineteenth-century Tongan

view seems to have been that the assassination which triggered off the long series

of civil wars was a reaction to the despotic behaviour of the chiefly victim; it is

also suggested that warlike habits were learned from the Fijians (Martin 1827, I:

77-80). There is, of course, no reason why either of these things should not have

happened at any time earlier, and it does seem very likely that the visits of the

explorers did somehow cause the transformation.

8 Histories structured and unstructured

1. In Munn's work we also find the incorporation of a specific kind of time which

is not historical: her phenomenological analysis centres upon intersubjective

'spacetime' but says very little about other sorts of temporality (cf. 1986:

1-11).

2. A curious implication of these claims is a radical devaluation of structure, since

if the 'vast scheme' could provide a precedent for any action, it can have played

no effective structuring role at all.

3. This is, of course, a matter of effect rather than necessary logical connection,

since there is no theoretical reason why the tenet about change should not be

linked with some different theory of the structural causes of larger trans-

formations. But this is neither provided for in Sahlins' theory, nor expressed in

any of his substantive analyses.

9 The look of events

1. In a discussion of the anthropological 'Enigma', Roy Wagner mentioned in

passing that the context of ethnographic fact might be 'viewed as historical

accretion or productive "system"' (1986: xiii). Given the history of anthro-

pology, how else might the alternatives be posed? But in another way of writing,

'context' might equally take the form of historical system or productive

accretion.

142

Bibliography

Abbreviations

BPBMB

Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin

JPH

Journal of Pacific History

JPS

Journal of the Polynesian Society

Abel, C. W. [1902] Savage life in New Guinea. London: London Missionary Society

Acar, Sebastian (1893-96) Journal. Typescript, Archives of the Congregation of the

Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, Rome

Adams, H. (1947) Memoirs of the Ari'i Taimaie. Paris: privately printed

Alexander, Charlotte (1934) William Patterson Alexander in Kentucky, the Marquesas,

Hawaii. Honolulu: privately printed

Alexander, James (1895) The islands of the Pacific. New York: American Tract

Society

Anon. (1817) [Review of Mariner's Tonga Islands]. Monthly Review 83: 337-59

Anon. (1868) Among the Pacific Islanders [review and extract of E. H. Lamont, Wild

life among the Pacific Islanders (London 1867)]. Chamber's Journal, January

1868: 55-8

Armstrong, William (1838) A sketch of Marquesan character. Hawaiian Spectator 1:

6-16

Asad, T. (ed.) (1973) Anthropology and the colonial encounter. London: Ithaca

Aug6, Marc (1982) The anthropological circle: symbol, function, history. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

Austin, Diane J. (1979) Symbols and culture: some philosophical assumptions in the

work of Clifford Geertz. Social Analysis 3: 45-59

Banks, Joseph [1962] The Endeavour journal of Joseph Banks, 1768-1771 (ed. J. C.

Beaglehole). Sydney: Public Library of New South Wales/Angus & Robertson

Bare, Jean-Francois (1985) Le malentendu Pacifique. Paris: Hachette

(1987) Tahiti, les temps et les pouvoirs: pour une anthropologie historique du Tahiti

post-europden. Paris: Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer

Beaglehole, E. and P. Beaglehole (1938) Ethnology of Pukapuka. BPBMB 150

Beaglehole, J. C. - see under Cook

Beattie, John (1965) Understanding an African kingdom: Bunyoro. New York: Holt,

Rinehart & Winston

Beckett, Jeremy (1987) Torres Strait islanders.: custom and colonialism. Sydney:

Cambridge University Press

Beechey, F. W. (1831) Narrative of a voyage to the Pacific... 1825-8. London:

Colburn

Bellwood, Peter (1978) Man's conquest of the Pacific. Sydney: Nelson

Belshaw, C. S. (1964) Under the ivi tree. London: Routledge

143

Bibliography

Bloch, Maurice (ed.) (1975) Marxist analyses in social anthropology. London: Malaby

(1986) From blessing to violence: history and ideology in the circumcision ritual of the

Merina of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

(1987) [Review of V. Valeri, Kingship and sacrifice (qv)]. Man (ns) 22: 218-19

Borofsky, R. (1987) Making history: Pukapukan and anthropological constructs of

knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

Brewster, A. B. (1922) The hill tribes of Fiji. London: Seeley, Service & Co.

Buck, Peter H. (Te Rangi Hiroa) (1932a) Ethnology of Manihiki and Rakahanga.

BPBMB 99

(1932b) Ethnology of Tongareva. BPBMB 92

(1934) Mangaian society. BPBMB 122

(1938) An introduction to Polynesian anthropology. BPBMB 187

Burrows, E. G. (1936) Ethnology of Futuna. BPBMB 138

(1937) Ethnology of Uvea. BPBMB 145

(1939) Western Polynesia: a study in cultural diferentiation. Gothenberg:

Ethnological Studies

Campbell, John (1840) Maritime exploration and Christian missions. London: John

Snow

Chaulet, Pierre (AMS = n.d.) Archipel des Marquises ou de Mendana. Supplement:

les Marquises payennes. MS, Archives, Diocese of Taiohae, Nukuhiva,

Marquesas Islands

(1873) Notices geographiques, ethnographiques et religieuses sur les Iles Marquises.

MS, Archives, Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, Rome

Churchward, William (1887) My consulate in Samoa. London: Bentley

Claessen, H. and P. Skalnik (1981) The early state. The Hague: Mouton

Clifford, James (1986) Introduction: partial truths. In Clifford and Marcus (eds.),

Writing culture (qv)

(1988) The predicament of culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds.) (1986) Writing culture: the poetics and

politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press

Clunie, Fergus (1986) Yalo i Viti. Shades of Fiji: a Fiji Museum catalogue. Suva:

Fiji Museum

Cohn, Bernard S. (1980) History and anthropology: the state of play. Comparative

Studies in Society and History 22: 198-221

Cohn, N. (1970) Pursuit of the millennium: revolutionary millenarianisms and mystical

anarchists of the Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press

Comaroff, Jean (1985) Body of power, spirit of resistance: the culture and history of a

South African people. Chicago: Chicago University Press

Cook, James [1955] The journals of Captain James Cook on his voyages of discovery.

Volume I. The voyage of the Endeavour... (ed. J. C. Beaglehole). Cambridge:

Hakluyt Society

[1961] The journals... Volume II. The voyage of the Resolution and Adventure,

1772-1775 (ed. J. C. Beaglehole). Cambridge: Hakluyt Society

[1967] The journals ... Volume III. The voyage of the Resolution and Discovery (ed.

J. C. Beaglehole). Cambridge: Hakluyt Society

Crook, William Pascoe (1800) An account of the Marquesas Islands. MS, Mitchell

Library, Sydney

Darling, David (1834-35) Journals at Vaitahu [Marquesas]. MS, South Seas Journals,

Council for World Mission collection, School of Oriental and African Studies,

London

144

Bibliography

Davenport, William H. (1986) Two kinds of value in the Eastern Solomon Islands.

In Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The social life of things. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

Davidson, Janet (1977) Western Polynesia and Fiji: prehistoric contact, diffusion and

differentiation in adjacent archipelagoes. World Archaeology 9: 82-94

(1978) Western Polynesia and Fiji: the archaeological evidence. Mankind (special

issue, Trade and exchange in Oceania and Australia, J. Specht and J. P. White

(eds.)) 11: 383-90

Davidson, J. W. (1955 [1966]) Problems of Pacific history. JPH 1: 5-21

Dening, Greg (1980) Islands and beaches. Discourse on a silent land: Marquesas

1774-1880. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press

(1986) Possessing Tahiti. Archaeology in Oceania 21:103-18

Dumont D'Urville, J. S. C. (1832) Sur les iles du Grand Ocean. Socidtd de Gdographie

Bulletin 17: 1-21

Dunnell, R. C. (1980) Evolutionary theory and archaeology. Advances in Archaeo-

logical Method and Theory 3: 38-99

Dupetit-Thouars, Abel (1840-43) Voyage autour du monde...1836-39. Paris: Gide

Eggan, Fred (1949) The Hopi and the lineage principle. In Fortes (ed.), Social

structure (qv)

Ekholm, Kajsa (1977) External exchange and the transformation of central African

social systems. In Friedman and Rowlands (eds.), The evolution of social systems

(qv)

(1981 [orig. 1976]) On the structure and dynamics of global systems. In Joel S.

Kahn and Josep R. Llobera (eds.), The anthropology of pre-capitalist societies.

London: Macmillan

Elkin, A. P. (1956) A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, 1880-1955 [obituary]. Oceania 24: 239-51

Ellis, William (1829) Polynesian researches. London: Fisher & Jackson

(1831) Polynesian researches. (4 vol. edn.) Reprint, Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1949) The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. Oxford: Oxford University

Press

(1962) History and anthropology. In Evans-Pritchard, Essays in social anthro-

pology. London: Faber & Faber.

(1981) A history of anthropological thought. London: Faber & Faber

Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. New

York: Columbia University Press

(1986) Language and colonial power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

(in press) Religious and secular colonialism: common ground. History and

Anthropology 4

Firth, Raymond (1929) Primitive economics of the New Zealand Maori. New York:

E. P. Dutton

(1936) We, the Tikopia. London: Allen & Unwin

Flenley, J. P. (1979) Stratigraphic evidence of environmental change on Easter Island.

Asian Perspectives 22: 33-40

Fleurieu, C. P. de C. (1801) A voyage round the world performed during the years 1790,

1791 & 1792 by Etienne Marchand. London: Longman Rees

Fornander, A. (1878-80) An account of the Polynesian race. Reprint, Rutland,

Vermont: Tuttle

Forster, Johann Reinhold (1778) Observations made during a voyage round the world.

London: Robinson.

[1982] The Resolution journal of Johann Reinhold Forster (ed. Michael E. Hoare).

London: Hakluyt Society

145

Bibliography

Fortes, Meyer (1949a) Preface. In Fortes (ed.), Social structure (qv)

(1949b) The web of kinship amongst the Tallensi. Oxford: Oxford University Press

(ed.) (1949) Social structure: studies presented to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Oxford:

Oxford University Press

Foster, Robert J. (1987) Thick beyond description: ethnography and culture as trope

[review article on Roy Wagner's Asiwinarong and Symbols which stand for

themselves (both 1986)]. Oceania 58: 148-56

Fox, J. J. (1977) Harvest of the palm. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Frankel, S. (1986) The Huli response to illness. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press

Freeman, Derek (1983) Margaret Mead and Samoa. Canberra: Australian National

University Press

Friedman, Jonathon (1972) Marxism, structuralism and vulgar materialism. Man 9:

444-69

(1981) Notes on structure and history in Oceania. Folk 23: 275-95

(1985) Captain Cook, culture and the world system. JPH 20: 191-201

Friedman J. and M. J. Rowlands (eds.) (1977) The evolution of social systems.

London: Duckworth

Geertz, Clifford (1968) Islam observed. Chicago: Chicago University Press

(1973) The interpretation of cultures: essays in interpretive anthropology. New

York: Basic Books

(1980) Negara: the theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press

(1983) Local knowledge.: further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York:

Basic Books

Gewertz, Deborah (1983) Sepik river societies. New Haven: Yale University Press

Giddens, Anthony (1979) Central problems in social theory. London: Macmillan

(1981) A contemporary critique of historical materialism. London: Macmillan

Gifford, E. W. (1924) Tongan myths and tales. BPBMB 8

(1929) Tongan society. BPBMB 61

Gill, William Wyatt (1876a) Life in the southern isles. London: Religious Tract

Society

(1876b) Myths and songs from the south Pacific. London: King

(1894) From darkness to light in Polynesia. Reprint, Suva: University of the South

Pacific

(1916) Rarotonga records. New Plymouth, NZ: Polynesian Society

Gilmour, James (1883) Among the Mongols. London: Religious Tract Society

Gilson, Richard (1980) The Cook Islands: 1820-1950. Wellington: Victoria University

Press

Godelier, Maurice (1977) Perspectives in Marxist anthropology. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

Goldman, Irving (1955) Status rivalry and cultural evolution in Polynesia. American

Anthropologist 57: 680-97

(1970) Ancient Polynesian society. Chicago: Chicago University Press

Golson, Jack (1971) Lapita ware and its transformations. In R. Green and M. Kelly

(eds.), Studies in Oceanic culture history. Honolulu: BPBM

Goodenough, Ward H. (1957) Oceania and the problem of controls in the study of

cultural and human evolution. JPS 66: 146-55

Gunn, William (1914) The Gospel in Futuna. London: Hodder & Stoughton

Gunson, Niel (1979) The hau concept of leadership in western Polynesia. JPH 14:

28-49

146

Bibliography

(1982) Polynesian studies: a decade of Tahitian history. JPH 17 (Bibliography and

Comment supplement): 66-72

Hale, Horatio (1846) United States exploring expedition. Ethnology and philology.

Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard

Handy, E. S. C. (1923) The native culture in the Marquesas. BPBMB 9

(1930) History and culture in the Society Islands. BPBMB 79

Handy, E. S. C. and M. K. Pukui (1958) The Polynesian family system in Ka'u,

Hawaii. Willington: Polynesian Society

Handy, W. C. (1923) Tattooing in the Marquesas. BPBMB I

(1938) L'art des Iles Marquises. Paris: Les editions d'art et d'histoire

(1965) Forever the land of men. New York

[Haweis, Thomas] (1798) On the Otaheitian sacrifice. Evangelical Magazine, Feb.

1798: 110-12.

Henry, Teuira (1928) Ancient Tahiti. BPBMB 48

Hjarno, J. (1979/80) Social reproduction: towards an understanding of aboriginal

Samoa. Folk 21-22: 72-123

Hoare, Michael E. (1976) The tactless philosopher: Johann Reinhold Forster, 1729-98.

Melbourne: Hawthorn Press

Hogbin, H. Ian (1931) The social organization of Ontong Java. Oceania 1: 399-425

Hooper, Antony (1985) Introduction. In A. Hooper and J. Huntsman (eds.)

Transformations of Polynesian culture. Auckland: Polynesian Society

Hooper, S. J. P. (1982) A study of valuables in the chiefdom of Lau, Fiji. PhD thesis,

University of Cambridge

Howard, Alan (1972) Polynesian social stratification revisited: reflections on castles

built of sand (and a few bits of coral). American Anthropologist 74: 811-23

Howe, K. R. (1984) Where the waves fall: a new South Seas history from first

settlement to colonial rule. Sydney: Allen & Unwin

Humphrey, Caroline (1982) Karl Marx collective. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press

Im Thurn, E. and L. Wharton (eds.) (1925) The journal of William Lockerby... with

other papers. London: Hakluyt Society

Ingold, Tim (1980) Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

(1986) Evolution and social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

IWGIA (1987) International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs. Yearbook 1986.

Copenhagen: IWGIA

Jolly, Margaret (1987) The chimera of equality in Melanesia. Mankind (special issue,

Equality and inequality, I. Bedford, G. Bottomley and A. Hamilton (eds.)) 17:

168-83

Kaeppler, Adrienne (1978) Exchange patterns in good and spouses: Fiji, Tonga and

Samoa. Mankind (special issue, Trade and exchange in Oceania and Australia, J.

Specht and J. P. White (eds.)) 11: 246-52

Kamakau, S. M. (1964) Ka Po'e Kahiko. the people of old. Honolulu: Bishop Museum

Press

Keesing, Roger M. (1985) Kwaio women speak: the micropolitics of autobiography

in a Solomon Island society. American Anthropologist 87: 27-39

(1987) Anthropology as interpretive quest. Current Anthropology 28: 161-76

Kekela, James (1854) Marquesas, island of Fatuhiva. The Friend 11: 26-7

Kent, Noel J. (1983) Hawaii: islands under the influence. New York: Monthly Review.

Kirch, Patrick Vinton (1984) The evolution.of the Polynesian chiefdoms. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

147

Bibliography

(1986) Rethinking east Polynesian prehistory. JPS 95: 9-40

(ed.) (1986) Island societies: archaeological approaches to evolution and trans-

formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Kirch, Patrick Vinton and Roger C. Green (1987) History, phylogeny and evolution

in Polynesia. Current Anthropology 28: 431-56

Krusenstern, A. J. von (1813) Voyage round the world...1803-1806. London: John

Murray

Kuper, Adam (1973) Anthropologists and anthropology: the British school 1922-1972.

Harmondsworth: Penguin

La Fontaine, J. S. (1985) Initiation. Harmondsworth: Penguin

Lakatos, I. and J. Musgrave (1970) Criticism and the growth of knowledge. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

Langham, Ian (1981) The building of British social anthropology. Dordrecht: Reidel

La Perouse, J. F. G. de (1797) Voyage autour du monde ... Paris

Latukefu, Sione (1970) King George Tupou I of Tonga. In J. W. Davidson and

Deryck Scarr (eds.), Pacific islands portraits. Canberra: Australian National

University Press

Lawson, Thomas (1868) Letter to Gulick, MS in Marquesas collection, Hawaiian

Mission Children's Society Library, Honolulu

Leach, Edmund (1954) Political systems of highland Burma. London: Athlone

(1961) Golden bough or gilded twig? Daedalus, Spring 1961: 371-86

(1973) Custom, law and terrorist violence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Leacock, Eleanor and Richard Lee (1982) Politics and history in band societies.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Lederman, R. (1986) What gifts engender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Leenhardt, Maurice (1947) Do kamo: lapersonne et la mythe dans le monde melanesien.

Paris: Institut d'Ethnologie

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1966) The savage mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

(1968) Introduction: History and anthropology, in Structural anthropology.

Harmondsworth: Penguin

Lewis, I. M. (ed.) (1968) History and social anthropology. London: Tavistock

Publications

(1986) Religion in context.: cults and charisma. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press

Linnekin, Jocelyn (1984) Children of the land: exchange and status in a Hawaiian

community. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press

Linton, Ralph (1923) The material culture of the Marquesas Islands. BPBM Memoir

8, Part 5.

(1925) Archaeology of the Marquesas Islands. BPBMB 23

(1939) Marquesan culture. In Abram Kardiner, The individual and his society. New

York: Columbia University Press

Lisiansky, U. (1814) A voyage round the world... 1803-1806. London: John Booth

Loeb, E. M. (1926) History and traditions of Niue. BPBMB 32

Macgregor, Gordon (1937) Ethnology of Tokelau. BPBMB 146

Macnaught, Timothy J. (1982) The Fijian colonial experience. Canberra: Research

School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922) Argonauts of the western Pacific. London: Routledge

Malo, D. (1951) Hawaiian antiquities. Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum Special

Publication

Marcus, George E. and Michael J. J. Fischer (1986) Anthropology as cultural critique.

Chicago: Chicago University Press

148

Bibliography

Martin, John (1827) An account of the natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific

Ocean...from the extensive communications of Mr. William Mariner... (3rd

edn.). Edinburgh: Constable

Marzan, Jean de (1908) Sur quelques societis secretes aux iles Fiji. Anthropos 3:

718-28

Maude, H. E. (1968) Of islands and men. Melbourne: Oxford University Press

(1982) Slavers in paradise: the Peruvian labour trade in Polynesia, 1862-63.

Canberra: Australian National University Press

McCoy, P. (1979) Easter Island. In Jesse D. Jennings (ed.), The Prehistory of

Polynesia. Canberra: Australian National University Press

Mead, Margaret (1930) The social organization of Manua. BPBMB 76

Metraux, Alfred (1940) Ethnology of Easter Island. BPBMB 160

Moore, S. F. (1986) Social facts and fabrications: 'customary' law on Kilimanjaro,

1880-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Moorehead, Alan (1968) The fatal impact. Harmondsworth: Penguin

Morrison, James [1935] The journal of James Morrison... together with an account of

the island of Tahiti (ed. O. Rutter). London: Golden Cockerel Press

Morton-Williams, P. (1968) The Fulani penetration into Nupe and Yoruba in

nineteenth century. In Lewis (ed.), History and social anthropology (qv)

Mouat, F. J. (1863) Adventures and researches among the Andaman Islanders. London

Munn, Nancy (1986) The fame of Gawa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Nayacakalou, R. (1975) Leadership in Fiji. Melbourne: Oxford University Press

Needham, Rodney (1974) Remarks and inventions: sceptical essays about kinship.

London: Chicago University Press

Oliver, Douglas L. (1974) Ancient Tahitian society. Canberra: Australian National

University Press

Ollivier, Pac6me (1867) Lettre du ... [concerning Easter Island]. Annales de la

propagation de la foi 39: 250-9

Ortner, Sherry B. (1981) Gender and sexuality in hierarchical societies: the case of

Polynesia and some comparative implications. In Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet

Whitehead (eds.), Sexual meanings: the cultural construction of gender and

sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Palmer, J. Linton (1870) A visit to Easter Island or Rapa Nui in 1868. Journal of the

Royal Geographical Society 40:167-81

Parmentier, R. J. (1987) The sacred remains: myth, history and polity in Belau.

Chicago: Chicago University Press

Pawley, Andrew (1981) Melanesian diversity and Polynesian homogeneity: a unified

explanation for language. In A. Pawley and J. Hollyman (eds.), Studies in Pacific

languages and cultures in honour of Bruce Biggs. Auckland: Linguistic Society of

New Zealand

Portman, M. V. (1899) A history of our relations with the Andamanese. Calcutta:

Govt. Printer

Radcliffe-Brown [then Brown], A. R. (1922) The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

(1931) The social organization of Australian tribes. Sydney: Oceania Monographs

Ralston, Caroline (1988) Ordinary women in early post-contact Hawaii. In M. Jolly

and M. Macintyre (eds.), Family and gender in the Pacific: domestic contradictions

and the colonial impact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Robarts, Edward [1974] The Marquesan journal of Edward Robarts (ed. G. Dening).

Canberra: Australian National University Press

Roggeveen, Jacob (1722 [1908]) Extracts from the official log of Mynheer J. Roggeveen

149

Bibliography

(1721--22) ... in Don Felipe Gonzalez y Haedo, The voyage to Easter Island in

1770-1771 (ed. B. Corney). London: Hakluyt Society

Rosaldo, R. (1980) Ilongot headhunting, 1883-1974. Stanford: Stanford University

Press

Routledge, Katherine Scoresby (1917) The bird cult of Easter Island. Folklore 28:

337-55

(n.d.) Ethnology (vols. 1-2). MS, Royal Geographical Society

(n.d.) Notes [on Easter Island] (vols. 3-4). MS, Royal Geographical Society

Rutherford, Noel (1977) Friendly Islands: a history of Tonga. Melbourne: Oxford

University Press

Ryazanov, N. P. (1825) [The first voyage of the Russians around the world].

Otechestvennye Zapiski 24: 73-96; 386-96 (in Russian)

Sagan, Eli (1985) At the dawn of tyranny. London: Faber & Faber

Sahlins, Marshall (1958) Social stratification in Polynesia. Seattle: American

Ethnological Society

(1962) Moala: culture and nature on a Fijian island. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press

(1981) Historical metaphors and mythical realities: structure in the early history of

the Sandwich Island kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

(1985a) Islands of history. Chicago: Chicago University Press

(1985b) Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia. In A. Hooper and J. Huntsman

(eds.), Transformations of Polynesian culture. Auckland: Polynesian Society

Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de (1981) The class struggle in the ancient Greek world. London:

Duckworth

Seabrook, A. (n.d.) Rurutuan culture. MS, Bishop Museum

Seddon, D. (ed.) (1978) Relations of production. London: F. Cass

Service, E. R. (1975) Origins of the state and civilization. New York: Norton

Shillibeer, J. (1817) A narrative of the Briton's voyage to Pitcairn's Island. Taunton:

Marriot

Shore, B. (1982) Sala'ilua: a Samoan mystery. New York: Columbia University Press

Slayter, Thomas (1843) May meeting in the Samoas. Missionary magazine and

chronicle 7: 54

Smith, Bernard (1960) European vision and the South Pacific. Oxford: Oxford

University Press

Spriggs, M. J. T. (1981) Vegetable kingdoms: taro irrigation and Pacific prehistory.

PhD thesis, Australian National University

Stair, John B. (1897) Old Samoa. London: Religious Tract Society

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1900) In the South Seas. London: Chatto & Windus

Steward, J. (1955) Theory of culture change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Stocking, George W. (1968) Race, language and culture. New York: Free Press

(1984) Radcliffe-Brown and British social anthropology. In Stocking (ed.),

Functionalism historicized: essays on British social anthropology (History of

Anthropology, vol. 2). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press

(ed.) (1985) Objects and others: essays on museums and material culture. (History of

anthropology, vol. 3). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press

Stokes, J. F. (n.d.) Ethnology of Rapa. MS, Bishop Museum

Tambiah, S. J. (1970) Buddhism and the spirit cults in north-east Thailand. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

Thomas, Keith (1971) Religion and the decline of magic. Harmondsworth: Penguin

150

Bibliography

Thomas, Nicholas (1985) Forms of personification and prestations. Mankind 15:

223-30

(1986a) 'Le roi de Tahuata': lotete and the transformation of south Marquesan

politics, 1826-1842. JPH 21: 3-20

(1986b) Gender and social relations in Polynesia: a critical note. Canberra

Anthropology 9: 78-89

(1987) Complementarity and history: misrecognizing gender in the Pacific. Oceania

57: 259-70

(1990) Marquesan societies: inequality and political transformations in eastern

Oceania. Oxford: Oxford University Press

(n.d. 1) Politicized values: barter and exchange on colonial peripheries. In Caroline

Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones (eds.), Barter, exchange and value.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

(n.d.2) Substantivization in anthropological discourse: the transformation of

practices into institutions in neotraditional Pacific societies. In James W. Carrier

(ed.), Tradition, history and articulation in Melanesian anthropology, forthcoming

Thompson, E. P. (1963) The making of the English working class. Harmondsworth:

Penguin

Thompson, Laura (1940) Southern Lau: an ethnography. BPBMB 162

Thomson, Basil (1908) The Fijians: a study in the decay of custom. London:

Macmillan

Thomson, W. J. (1889) Te Pito te Henua or Easter Island. In US National Museum

Annual Report: 447-552

Tjibao, J.-M. and P. H. Missotte (trans. C. Plant) (1978) Kanak.: the Melanesian

way. Papeete, Tahiti: Les editions du pacifique

Troost, C. P. (1829) Aanteekeningen gehouden op eene reis om dem wereld...1824-26.

Rotterdam

Turnbull, John (1813) A voyage around the world... 1800-1804 (2nd edn.). London:

A. Maxwell

Turner, George (1884) Samoa a hundred years ago and long before. London: J. Snow

Urry, James (1983) [Review of Langham, The Building of British social anthropology

(qv)]. Oceania 53: 400-2

Valeri, Valerio (1985) Kingship and sacrifice: ritual and society in ancient Hawaii.

Chicago: Chicago University Press

Wagner, Roy (1986) Asiwinarong: ethos, image and social power among the Usen

Barok of New Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press

White, Caroline (1981) Patrons and partisans: a study of two southern Italian comuni.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

White, Isobel (1981) Mrs Bates and Mr Brown: an examination of Rodney

Needham's allegations. Oceania 51:193-210

Whittaker, Ian (1968) Tribal structure and national politics in Albania, 1910-1950.

In Lewis (ed.), History and social anthropology (qv)

Williams, Thomas (1884 [orig. 1858]) Fiji and the Fijians. London: T. Woolmer

[1931] The journal of Thomas Williams, Fiji 1840-1853 (ed. G. C. Henderson).

Sydney: Angus & Robertson

Williamson, R. W. (1924) The social and political systems of central Polynesia.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Wilson, William [et al.] (1799) A missionary voyage in the southern Pacific

Ocean... 1796-1798. London: T. Chapman

151

Bibliography

Wood, Michael (1982) Kamula social structure and ritual. PhD thesis, Macquarie

University

Worsley, Peter (1957) The trumpet shall sound: a study of 'cargo' cults in Melanesia.

London: MacGibbon and Kee

Young, Michael W. (1983) Magicians of Manumanua: living myth in Kalauna.

Berkeley: California University Press.

152

Index

Abel, C. W., 70-71

agency, in colonial history, 111-14

Andaman Islanders, 21-23, 26, 55, 119,

125 n6

Aneityum, 53

anthropology, history of, 19

anthropology, professionalization of,

19-20, 22-24, 125 n8

anthropology, symbolic, 7-8, 9, 16

archaeology, 66, 115, 122, 124 n5

Aug6, M., 125 n5

Australian Aborigines, 23-24, 106, 107,

125 n7

Bali, 26, 126 n9

Barolong, 7

Bates, D., 125, n7

Beattie, J., 13

Belshaw, C. S., 83

Benedict, R., 18

Bishop Museum, 18, 32, 42, 43-49, 128 n5,

129 n6, n8, n9

Boas, F., 18, 33

Borofsky, R., 129 n5

Boswell, J., 75

Bougainville, L. de, 42, 54, 78

Bourdieu, P., 5, 102, 108

Buck, P., 32, 44-48, 129, n6

Bunyoro, 13

Burrows, E. W., 45

Campbell, J., 31, 32

Chagga, 7

Chaulet, P., 64, 74-75, 83, 130 n2, 132 n9

chieftainship, 29, 40, 52-53, 55, 56-58,

60-61, 104-5, 132 nn 9, 12

Churchward, W., 32

Clunie, F., 82

Cohn, B., 3, 11

colonial history, 10, 17, 55-56, 82, 96-101,

111, 116, 123 nl

Comaroff, J., 7

Cook, Capt. J., 29, 42, 62, 75, 77, 78,

103-6, 107

Cook Islands, 128 n2

Crook, W., 74, 134 n6

cultural materialism, 9

Darling, D., 134 n5

Delmas, S., 52

Dening, G., 134 n9

detective stories, 118-19

'devolution', 65

Dumont D'Urville, J. S. C., 31

Easter Island, see Rapanui

ecological change, 61-64

Ekholm, K., 16, 87-89, 97

Elkin, A. P., 125 n7

Ellis, W., 57, 71

epistemological models, 2, 7, 12-14, 17,

33-34, 49-50, 67-68, 119-20

ethnohistory, 3, 125 n5

Evans-Pritchard, 6, 18, 21, 123 n2

events, interpretation of, 80-85, 108--9,

117-19

evolution, concepts of, 3-4, 36-41, 49-50,

86-101, 121-22, 134-35 nl

evolutionism, covert, 17, 28, 35, 109-11,

114, 121-22, 127 n2

Fabian, J., I118, 119

feminist critique, 48

fieldwork, status of, 13, 25, 70, 74, 79,

Index

Firth, R., 32, 84

Forster, J. R., 29, 30, 69, 126 nl

Fortes, M., 124 nl, 125 n7

Frazer, J. G., 133 nl

Freeman, D., 15

Friedman, J., 16, 38, 90-92, 98, 107, 135

n2

functionalism, 9, 11, 15, 19, 32, 44, 103

Futuna, 127 nl

Geertz, C., 18, 24-27, 69-70, 77, 125-26

n9, nl0, nl

Gewertz, D., 6

Giddens, A., 4-5

Gillen, F., 23

Gilmour, J., 72-73

Goldman, I., 15, 33, 35-50, 58-59, 65, 66,

76, 89, 91-92, 110, 127--28 nn 1-3, n5,

132 nl

Green, R. C., 134-35 nl

Gregory, H., 129 n6

Gunson, W. N., 128 n5

Handy, E. S. C., 51-56, 67, 80, 129 n9,

130-32 ns 1-8

Handy, W. C., 52

Hawaii, 35, 37, 52, 91, 92, 100, 104-14

passim, 135 nlI

history, concepts of, 3-4, 5-6

history, and diffusionism, 18, 44

history, marginalization of, 5, 6, 9-11, 18,

20-22, 27, 44-47, 95-96, 102-3, 120-21,

136 nl

Hogbin, H. I., 126 n2

Hooper, S., 83

Howitt, A. W., 23

human sacrifice, 132-33, n12

hunter-gatherer societies, 11, 124 n3

interpretive anthropology, 2-3, 24-27, 125

n9

Javanese, 26, 27

Kachin, 38

Keesing, R. M., 81

Kirch, P., 134-35 nl

Kongo, 97, 98

Krusernstern, A. J. von, 52, 74

Langham, I., 39, 124 ni

La Prouse, J. F. G., 63-64

154

Lawson, T., 131 n6

Leach, E., 38, 124 n2, 133 nI

Lederman, R., 58

Leenhardt, M., 14-15, 124 n4

Levi-Strauss, 6, 10, 107, 123 n2

Lewis, I., 38

Linton, R., 51

Lowie, R., 18

Madagascar, 88

Malinowski, B., 20, 44, 70-71, 72-73, 74, 79

Man, E., 22

Mangaia, 48, 91

Mangareva, 39, 93, 94

Mariner, W., 42, 74, 76, 77

Marquesas, 40, 51-59 passim, 64, 65, 66,

67, 68, 74-75, 91, 93, 94, 98, 130-32

Mathews, R. H., 23, 125 n7

Maude, H. E., 76

Mead, M., 15, 18, 32, 44

Mesopotamia, 88

M&etraux, A., 32, 44, 60

missionaries, 14-15, 69, 73, 75, 81, 112

Index

Rapanui, 31, 37, 46, 51, 59-64, 68, 91, 93,

100, 132 nl1, 133 n12

regional systems theory, 12, 16, 86-101

Robarts, E., 73, 132 n9

Roth, W., 23

Routledge, C. S., 60-61

Sahlins, M., 16-17, 32, 33, 103-14, 129 n5,

131 n3, 132 n9, 136 n3

Samoa, 37, 40-41, 91, 99, 119

Sepik, 6

Shore, B., 119

Siberia, 49

Smith, B., 126 n1, 134 n9, n1il1

Society Islands, 46, 84, 93, 98, 128 n2

Solomon Islands, 81

sources (mission writing etc.), 14, 16,

41-42, 54-55, 69-85, passim, 121,

123 nl, 129, n9, 130 n2, 133 n1

Spencer, B., 23

Stewart, C. S., 57

Steward, J., 87

Strehlow, C., 14

system/change opposition, 10-11, 103, 107

Tahiti, see also Society Islands, 31, 52, 57,

62, 78, 91, 94, 111, 130 nl, 133 n12

Tikopia, 32, 37, 84

Tonga, 30, 37-41 passim, 76, 83, 91, 92,

98, 99, 130 nl 1, 135 nn 1, 2, 136 n3

Tongareva, 47, 48

travel writing, authority in, 72-73

Trobriands, 91

Tuamotu archipelago, 93

Turner, G., 32

Uvea, 45

Wagner, R., 1, 5, 136 nl

Wallis, Capt. J., 46

Williamson, R. W., 129 n9

Wilson, W., 29, 31

155



Ann Arbor Paperbacks

Waddell, The Desert Fathers

Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

Donne, Devotions

Malthus, Population: The First Essay

Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism

Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne

Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue

Gilson, Heloise and Abelard

Aristotle, Metaphysics

Kant, Education

Boulding, The Image

Duckett, The Gateway to the Middle Ages (3

vols.): Italy; France and Britain;

Monasticism

Bowditch and Ramsland, Voices of the

Industrial Revolution

Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and

Leninism or Marxism?

Rexroth, Poems from the Greek Anthology

Zoshchenko, Scenes from the Bathhouse

Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval

London

Procopius, Secret History

Adcock, Roman Political Ideas and Practice

Swanson, The Birth of the Gods

Xenophon, The March Up Country

Trotsky, The New Course

Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus of

Consent

Hobson, Imperialism

Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian

Statesman

Kinietz, The Indians of the Western Great

Lakes 1615-1760

Bromage, Writing for Business

Lurie, Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of

Crashing Thunder

Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico

Meier, Negro Thought in America,

1880-1915

Burke, The Philosophy of Edmund Burke

Michelet, Joan of Arc

Conze, Buddhist Thought in India

Arberry, Aspects of Islamic Civilization

Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other

Stories

Gross, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry

Zola, The Masterpiece

Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition

Aristophanes, Four Comedies

Aristophanes, Three Comedies

Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman

Duckett, Carolingian Portraits

Rapoport and Chammah, Prisoner's Dilemma

Aristotle, Poetics

Peattie, The View from the Barrio

Duckett, Death and Life in the Tenth Century

Langford, Galileo, Science and the Church

McNaughton, The Taoist Vision

Anderson, Matthew Arnold and the Classical

Tradition

Milio, 9226 Kercheval

Weisheipl, The Development of Physical

Theory in the Middle Ages

Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

Gershman, The Surrealist Revolution in

France

Lester, Theravada Buddhism in Southeast

Asia